Disabled people 'pay more for public transport'
If you're looking at the title of this post and thinking "Erm, and how is that news? We all know that!" - well, that might be true, but it's good to have it confirmed by a genuine survey. And that's what has happened thanks to a recent 'mystery shopper' style undercover investigation called , which was carried out by , a nationwide organisation of young disabled and non-disabled canpaigners between the ages of 16 and 30 - part of the .
To compile the report, over 100 young disabled people from all over the United Kingdom spent the past three months going undercover on the nation's public transport system. Between them, they racked up over 200 journeys. But what did they discover? These are some of the key findings:
• Wheelchair users pay more to use public transport than non-disabled people, because of a lack of choice in accesible transport.
• On the railways, over half the stations used lacked basic disabled facilities; the same was true on board the trains.
• On a third of bus journeys, the mystery commuter was unable to board the first bus which arrived at the bus stop.
• Two out of five of the young disabled people involved in the investigation were forced to pay more to use a wheelchair accessible taxi, compared with their non-disabled counterparts.
The full report was presented to MPs at the House of Commons last week, and the young campaigners called on the Government, local authorities and transport providers to review their accessibility policies. Watch this space, as they say.
In the meantime, [note: this is a link to a PDF file], or see how your region of the country fared via this .
Comment number 1.
At 28th May 2009, Dr Bee wrote:Glad I found your blog - this is a very interesting item. I realised recently that my enthusiasm to be environmentally conscious was hampered by the fact that I couldn't easily make a long distance journey by rail :s The only really feasible way of doing it was by plane - which ironically cost less - but made me feel bad about my Carbon footprint!
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