01479255

Component

There is an ever-growing interest in the measure of the performances of an urban public transport network for people with reduced mobility. This is leading to the need for further defining methods to help city managers better plan and improve accessible public transport. This paper presents a system for assessing the level of accessibility for people with reduced mobility of an existing urban public transport network from the transport operator perspective. By analyzing different types of data related to both the cities’ network infrastructure and the travelers’ demand, the system is able to suggest which are the best transportation infrastructure investments that meet the needs of people with reduced mobility in order of priority and with respect to the money budgets available. The authors show the effectiveness of the proposed system by means of two case studies focused on very different cities: London and Washington, D.C. Regarding the city of London, the results show that by making accessible a particular station (Farringdon, Hammersmith & City) it is possible to reduce the total travel by a factor which is more than 8 times better than a random choice, and more than 30% more effective than a solution minimizing the number of interchanges. Regarding Washington, D.C., the authors found that Rosslyn metro station presents the highest number of trips (more than 1000 trips per day) affected by outages of the station’s elevators and escalators.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE60 Accessible Transportation and Mobility.

01470560

13-3907

English

14p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Accessibility; Elevators; Escalators; Mobility; Persons with disabilities; Rail transit stations; Urban areas

London (England); Washington (District of Columbia)

Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; Terminals and Facilities; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-3907

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:45PM