Learning from the Travel Experiences of Persons with Disabilities: Investigating Navigation Challenges Posed by Infrastructure

The transportation experiences of people with disabilities have improved since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990. Despite progress, many aspects of the current transportation system still limit people with disabilities from traveling safely and efficiently. Moreover, transportation planning and design efforts consistently lack representation of people with disabilities. This research seeks to address this disconnect via semi-structured interviews with 37 stakeholders. Among those, 28 are people with disabilities or are caretakers/advocates and nine are government officials whose work intersects with the supply of infrastructure regulated under the ADA. One objective is to understand how attributes of transportation infrastructure impact the daily mobility of people with disabilities. A second is to understand how the implementation and management of transportation assets impact the accessibility of travel for people with disabilities. Through a thematic and content analysis of interview data, the authors reveal hard infrastructure issues, such as intersection design and programming/management issues, such as communication of transit service changes that impact the daily travel experiences of people with disabilities. Further, government officials demonstrated how supply and implementation challenges, including funding and maintenance, affect the condition of transportation assets. Stakeholders from both cohorts expressed the need for more inclusion of people with disabilities’ lived experiences to inform transportation decisions. Together, these challenges diminish the quality of mobility options and quality of life and are discriminatory by preventing equal access for people with disabilities. These challenges demonstrate that even with minimum design requirements set by ADA for the public right-of-way, barriers still exist within the built environment and within agencies responsible for managing transportation assets. In order to remove these barriers and create a more accessible transportation environment, planners, policymakers, and engineers must collaborate with people with disabilities to consider how the design of transportation systems can be improved to support accessibility for all.

• Record URL:
  https://www.ugpti.org/resources/reports/details.php?id=1155
• Record URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/74189
• Summary URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/74190
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This document was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, University Transportation Centers Program.
• Corporate Authors:

  University of Colorado, Denver

  Denver, CO  United States 

  Mountain-Plains Consortium

  North Dakota State University
  Fargo, ND  United States  58108

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Authors:
  • Wagner, Molly
  • Shirgaokar, Manish
  • Marshall, Wesley
• Publication Date: 2024-4

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Edition: Final Report
• Features: Appendices; Figures; Maps; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 44p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Accessibility; Asset management; Infrastructure; Mobility; Persons with disabilities; Transportation planning
• Identifier Terms: Americans with Disabilities Act
• Subject Areas: Planning and Forecasting; Society; Transportation (General);

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01915489
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: MPC-24-515
• Contract Numbers: MPC-614
• Files: UTC, NTL, TRIS, USDOT
• Created Date: Apr 18 2024 9:47AM