CILT's Accessibility and Inclusion Forum has released its latest white paper: Joined-up Journeys: Integration and Interchange – making travel work for disabled and older people.

Supported by The Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation, this toolkit is intended for anyone who is working with or for a local authority, contractor or transport provider and is involved in the planning and implementation of the pedestrian environment, transport infrastructure or transport services.

This paper was created after the Forum hosted a one-day seminar that explored the challenges faced by disabled and older people. Here, delegates discussed practical solutions and examples of good practice to achieve joined up journeys.

Over recent years, legal requirements and changing attitudes and understanding have led to greater recognition of the need for vehicles, transport interchanges and pedestrian areas to be easily accessible to older and disabled people. However, all too often these developments take place in isolation, so their usefulness to these groups is limited. This toolkit offers a detailed view on the measures transport providers and local authorities must take to ensure people can continue to live independently through effective and efficient accessible transport.

Peter Rayner, Chair, Accessibility and Inclusion Forum, CILT, says: “Accessibility to public transport and to the pedestrian environment are both an economic and a social imperative. Continuing mobility is key to enabling disabled and older people to remain independent and able to contribute both directly and indirectly to the country’s economy.

“Unless transport and infrastructure improvements and developments are seen as inextricably linked, there will be breaks in the chain of accessible transport/mobility. Unless every link in the accessibility chain is complete, journeys will be impossible for some and difficult for many. This is not just a social issue, important though that is. It is also an economic issue. Investment in accessible facilities and services in isolation will not deliver accessibility.

“Without accessibility, many people are unable to live independently or to travel for education, work or leisure, or even to retain the most basic mobility to get to the local shops. The costs both to the individual and to the economy are huge.”

Launched in 2015, the Accessibility and Inclusion Forum ensures that the changing needs of the UK’s large and growing population of older and disabled people are properly understood and reflected in the development of transport policy and the design and delivery of transport services across all modes and sectors at both national and local levels.

For more information and to join CILT’s Accessibility and Inclusion Forum; www.ciltuk.org.uk/accessibility