Sight Impaired in Public Transport Revisited - An Investigation of Perception Gaps Between Sight Impaired and Public Transport Companies

Mobility is the key to unlocking modern world services and amenities. This is not only true for the field of personal transport but more general for all forms of mobility, be they social, virtual or physical. This paper is going to focus on the area of transport or traffic mobility. Over the course of the last 60 years, the mobility options that are provided to citizens of large cities all around the world have improved drastically. This has lead to an increasing usage, enabled persons to accept job offerings farther away from their homes and engage in social activities of greater variety. However with this continuous improvement of transport services, public as well as individual, a certain dependency upon them has begun to develop. Recognising this, public authorities established public service agreements with the companies running the public transport services. On the basis of legal requirements and related standards modern public service agreements need to include the requirement of barrier free services. However, as has been established by Fürst and Kuhar (2009) as well as Fürst and Vogelauer (2011, 2012a) some groups, especially the ones with publicly less observable impairments (low vision, hard-of-hearing), are often overlooked and ignored when designing barrier-free public environments and transport services. This is even more interesting as almost all respective legal documents on supra-/international (European Union, 2006, 2007, 2010, 2011, United Nations, 2008) as well as national (BGG, 2007, BGStG, 2011, Department of Justice, 2010, Equality Act, 2010) levels include explicit sections that relate to sight impaired and their needs. In the case of sight impaired this negligence is especially problematic, as systems that are designed to fulfill the needs of this group also increase the usability for all passengers, thus being advantageous for everyone. Furthermore, according to conservative estimations (Leitner, 2008), the sight impaired compose the single largest group among the impaired community as a whole. Therefore it seems highly indicated to investigate – and subsequently match – the perceptions this group has on current public transport systems as well as the perception that public transport providers, public authorities and equipment providers have on the needs, barriers and possible solutions for sight impaired.

• Record URL:
  • https://aetransport.org/past-etc-papers/conference-papers-2012
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstract used by permission of Association for European Transport.
• Corporate Authors:

  Association for European Transport (AET)

  1 Vernon Mews, Vernon Street, West Kensington
  London W14 0RL,    
• Authors:
  • Fürst, Elmar
  • Vogelauer, Christian
• Conference:
  • European Transport Conference 2012
  • Location: Glasgow , Scotland
  • Date: 2012-10-8 to 2012-10-10
• Publication Date: 2012

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Bibliography; Figures; Tables;
• Pagination: 24p
• Monograph Title: European Transport Conference 2012

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Barrier free design; Mobility; Perception; Persons with disabilities; Transit operating agencies; Visually impaired persons
• Subject Areas: Design; Public Transportation; Society; I20: Design and Planning of Transport Infrastructure;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01542429
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Oct 29 2014 11:26AM