IMPROVING THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC TRANSPORT INFORMATION FOR PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

While transport is a significant enabler of sustaining livelihoods among poor communities, it is clearly also increasingly deemed important to deliver the benefits of greater inclusion of persons with disabilities into society, particularly in developing and transition countries. Throughout the developing world, the existing transport systems fail to serve the needs of the majority of persons with disabilities. Research undertaken on behalf of the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID) indicated that access to information in appropriate formats was a significant barrier to travel for people with sensory and intellectual disabilities. Building on from the previous work, another DFID-funded project, to be completed in August 2005, aims to design and test appropriate low-cost technologies for information provision along the entire travel chain in services provided by public transport vehicles in India and South Africa. The paper scans the existing practice in both developed and developing countries relating to the provision of public transport information to persons with disabilities and provides an overview of the range of issues and that need to be taken into account in designing robust, easily accessible and practical public transport information for passengers with disabilities and all passengers. It then describes the pilot projects being conducted in South Africa and India