How can we begin to address the problem of accessible transportation for people with disabilities?

[kestrell]

Recently, some of us were talking about the shortcomings of transit programs for people with disabilities, and one person asked why para-transit programs everywhere were such a mess. I thought that was a great question, so I went looking for a book that addressed it.

This looks like the best book on the general subject of the difficulties involved in planning for public transit and methods for solving some of those problems, so I'm posting the title and links to online excerpts here. Note: this book doesn't address para-transit psecifically, and I haven't read it yet, so can't speak for how useful it actually turns out to be, but I will review it once I read it.
This book is available on Bookshare.org.

Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking about Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities (2012)
by Jarett Walker
The table of contents is online here
https://humantransit.org/book/table-of-contents
and the complete introduction to the book is here
https://humantransit.org/book

Comments

[ambyr]

I’ve read it; it’s a good basic introduction to a lot of concepts. If you decide you want to make a deeper dive into reading about transit planning after reading that I can make some suggestions, though I don’t know any books explicitly about paratransit.

[kestrell]

Thank you! I never would have thought I was the sort of geek who would voluntarily read about transportation systems, but I'm beginning to see it as another one of the intersections of disability and technology that expresses cultural attitudes.

[siderea]

Kes, did you read my thing about disability, women, and buses?
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1170318.html

Not at all to this point re paratransit, it's off on a different tanget, but it indirectly talks about how norms - particularly ideas about what constitutes reasonable behavior on other people's parts – shapes policy decisions in public transit that can be discriminatory in surprising ways.

[kestrell]

Last Saturday, Alexx and I took a bus somewhere, and I was verbally gushing about the fact that the front seats for PWD and older folks was actually scaled to someone under six feet tall, so for once my feet didn't dangle and I didn't keep sliding back in the seat.

Seriously, how often are things scaled to be easily accessible to women, let along people in wheelchairs and scooters? The default is still for men.

Resources for Paratransit Policy

[jesse_the_k]

While the Paratransit Watch blog stopped updating in 2016, there's a ton of info there. Here's their "policy resources" post
http://paratransitwatch.blogspot.com/2006/12/policy.html

Since so much transit is Federally funded, the Feds also pay for a lot of research and technical assistance, available from a variety of places.

Transportation Research Board, a National Academies of Science project at
https://www.trb.org
Their "paratransit policy" search yields ~60 returns
All their materials are free, and some are even useful.

Easter Seals Project Action spent 28 years providing technical assistance and research on all modes of accessible transportation. After that Federal money went away, they pivoted to consulting on these services:
https://www.projectaction.com/news-and-resources
That's the place to get "how to" guides for transit managers, as well as support for travel trainers.

The National Aging and Disability Transportation Resource Center
https://www.nadtc.org
spends Federal money to collect info on all ways that disabled and older people get around. The contractors are Easter Seals and National Association of Area Agencies for Aging.

Acronyms abound: NEMT is a key concept, since Non Emergency Medical Transportation is what gets all of us to the doctor/dentist/prosthetist/PT/shrink and more.

Re: Resources for Paratransit Policy

[kestrell]

Thanks, J.! I've started writing a doc that attempts to highlight some of the precise problems PWD experience with programs that fall short of providing reliable transportation to medical care and support services.

Would you be willing to review it and give feedback once I'm done? I would really value your thoughts and suggestions, and I'm trying to keep the doc short.

Re: Resources for Paratransit Policy

[jesse_the_k]

Only dark chocolate would give me greater pleasure