A New Approach to Designing Transport Systems Free of Mobility Barriers

“You only need empathy in design, if you have excluded the people you claim to have empathy for.”

– Liz Jackson, Founder of The Disabled List

The ambition of the TRIPS project is to make public transport more accessible for persons with disabilities, elderly voyagers and really everyone. 

We want to address barriers commonly faced by users with and without disabilities in public transport and implement steps to avoid barriers of any sort in urban transport. 

By ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the EU and all Member States have committed to respect the rights of people with disabilities, including the right to mobility and independent living. In practice however, these rights have not yet been implemented in large parts of the EU and many of today’s transport systems remain inaccessible. As a consequence, people are disabled from accessing job opportunities, education, social and leisure activities and other services. This limits lifestyle choices, reinforces exclusion from local communities, and ultimately blocks people from participating in society as full and independent citizens.

The TRIPS project will:

Propose a co-design approach that allows people, disabled by inaccessible environments, to take the leading role in designing accessible and useable transport systems. By focusing on the experience and needs of disabled people, we aim to directly address a wide variety of barriers in current urban transport systems. This includes also barriers due to for example age, health, or language.

Provide case studies that show how such co-designed mobility solutions can indeed provide inclusive urban transport-for-all in seven example European example cities: Bologna, Brussels, Cagliari, Lisbon, Sofia, Stockholm and Zagreb.