Are you interested in a brand-new measuring system of public transport accessibility for people with disabilities? Have a look at the TRIPS project’s White Paper about the Mobility Divide Index (MDI).
The TRIPS consortium views accessibility as an indicator of the user experience and provides a comprehensive evaluation metric that reflects disabled users’ experience with the view to inform policy directions, investment decisions and transport plans.
The White Paper describes this innovative methodology, giving you a glimpse into the co-design approach that guided a group of experienced disability rights activists and people working directly with persons with disabilities to reflect on what affects their journeys and to outline the index framework.
Our ambition is to engage all those in the transport ecosystem that can use the MDI to highlight which directions for service innovation and improvements will have the biggest impact on citizens.
We started to test the developed metrics in the TRIPS pilot cities to identify the current accessibility levels of the cities’ public transport services and we identified the main critical issues giving an example of a useful tool to achieve equal access for all.
The methodology and the preliminary results have been presented at the 49th European Transport Conference on 14 September 2021 in the session on “Inclusive Mobility”, attracting the attention of transport practitioners and researchers from all over Europe and beyond.
We would like to promote a user-friendly tool to take a breakthrough stance: viewing accessibility as an issue that must reflect the views of people with disabilities and that concerns all the stakeholders of the transport ecosystem who worked hand-in-hand with disabled people to design and construct vehicles and infrastructure that are accessible to all users.