This blog describes a scene I watched recently where a taxi driver picked up an elderly passenger. Although a small incident in itself, I think it illustrates a fundamental problem in reconciling active travel infrastructure with good access for disabled people, which deserves much wider discussion and deeper thought.

Right now, the City of Edinburgh Council is consulting about the future of its temporary ‘Spaces for People’ schemes. As in many places, a range of measures have been installed to aid social distancing and encourage active travel; typically pop up cycle lanes, widened footways and roads closed to motor traffic. There seems little doubt that public opinion is polarised, with many people and businesses seeing them as half-baked measures frustrating everyday movement (especially by car) and others seeing them as an essential step towards a more sustainable future. 

There is also little doubt that some schemes are a cause of deep concern for many disabled people. A ‘poll’ carried out by Disability Equality Scotland last September (bit.ly/3pcIoS2) found that 71% of respondents said that their life had been made more difficult by Spaces for People (compared to only 10% who said it had made life easier). 

I was walking along Morningside Road in December last year when a taxi pulled up almost beside me. It stopped just at the entrance to a segregated pop-up cycle lane, blocking it entirely so I paused to see why he did this. The taxi driver left his cab and began looking for his passenger. After perhaps a minute, he walked on and turned the corner into Church Hill Place, returning a few minutes later accompanying a very frail lady using a walking frame, I would guess in her late 80s or 90s. They made their way slowly to the taxi and the driver helped her in, before then driving off. 

This scene was unsatisfactory for everyone involved: the passenger had to walk a significant distance despite her very obvious mobility difficulty; the cycle way was blocked and unusable for the time the taxi was stopped; the taxi driver spent longer on the job than he would no doubt have liked.

In terms of the process, TAP had secured some funding from the Scottish Borders Council and wanted to find some support to help their members look critically at the pedestrian environment and find ways that it could be made better for disabled people. We agreed to arrange a series of street access audits in September and October, before the winter weather set in; however, this also was when new restrictions on gathering and physical distancing came in. As a result, I thought that we would need to postpone the project. 

However, the Chair of the Panel proposed a creative solution - that we would do audits, not in small groups but in pairs, and then I had the job to collate and assemble our findings. So I carried out three audits in Peebles (essentially north, central and south) with the TAP chair, while other members of TAP ‘buddied together’ on walks in pairs to carry out their own surveys in the town. In all, we conducted seven ‘mini-audits’ between us and these were collected into three reports (plus a summary). 

Inevitably, this method meant that some of the richness of on-site discussions about different views was lost. Everyone has a unique perspective and different people pick up on different things during an audit, and I only got to meet two of the TAP members. However, it was possible in this way to bring together a wide range of different inputs while complying with Covid-19 guidance, and producing resources which will hopefully result in tangible improvements to the town’s accessibility.

The findings of this work are for TAP to take forward as they see fit. But I was struck by some observations about pedestrian mobility in the town which I think are of broader significance. 

Firstly, on my initial visit, I was quite surprised to find that the High Street had only a single pedestrian crossing (a pelican).  As a result, people are constantly walking in and through traffic to cross the High Street. If a vibrant street like this is to work at its best, it must be easier to cross it safely!

The broad High Street itself is (less surprisingly) packed with cars. Relatively high levels of car use and dependency are always a factor in rural market towns, and Peebles has an additional fundamental problem in that the A72 runs straight through the town centre. However, there must be options to reduce the dominance of traffic through the town - most obviously the introduction (along with other towns in the Scottish Borders) of experimental introduction of a 20mph limit must surely make sense on a permanent basis?

Finally, away from the town centre, the engineering of residential areas illustrates the massive legacy of streets hostile to walking which so many towns suffer from. In the south of the town especially, the post-war housing estates have massive ‘bell-mouth’ splays at almost all junctions, encouraging vehicles to move fast and increasing the distance for pedestrians to cross. In the older northern part of the town, many pavements are barely a metre wide, often adjacent to significant traffic levels. Although most pavement surfaces are in relatively fair condition, dropped kerbs and (even more so) tactile paving is scarce. In these circumstances, it was therefore not surprising to learn (and observe) that many wheelchair users and buggy pushers use the road rather than the pavements. A sight which is a fairly damning verdict on the pedestrian environment…

Overall, this is not an environment which encourages everyday walking and wheeling and will take years and a lot of money to fix, and of course, not just in Peebles. At a national level, new plans and priorities for infrastructure investment are being made, through the work of the National Infrastructure Commission and soon, the Strategic Transport Projects Review. Will this result in real investment in better neighbourhood pavements, road crossings and such like? This may not generate the same headlines as duelling trunk roads or launching new ‘active travel freeways’, but might be the best value investment of all, for the benefits to health, local economies, inclusion and the environment.  We need to make a start!

The year 2020 marks 25 years since the passing of the first Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). Shamefully, transport was entirely exempted from Part III of the Act, which outlawed discrimination against disabled people in accessing goods, facilities and services. The Department of Transport fought tooth and nail against including a general right of access to transport in the 1995 Bill (education was also initially excluded). The government saw the proposed DDA as a more business-friendly alternative to a rights-based approach to tackling disability discrimination through a Civil Rights (Disabled Persons) Bill, such as proposed by Harry Barnes MP - and as supported by the disability rights movement.  Explaining the exclusion of transport (and education) from the Bill, Disability Minister William Hague said in March 1995 “we have had the good sense to allow that matters such as education and transport deserve to be treated in a different way.” (1)  

The government maintained this stance throughout the passage of the Bill.  In the House of Lords, on 22 May 1995, Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish (Minister of State, Department of Social Security) said “We have…made it clear that we believe that progress towards accessible public transport is best achieved by targeted action rather than by any kind of blanket legislation. Different modes of transport inevitably require different access solutions. A simple application of Part III to transport vehicles is not therefore appropriate." (2)

The government also initially rejected the more specific case for requiring minimum access standards for public transport vehicles. Defending this, William Hague had said in January 1995 “It is obvious nonsense to suggest that excluding transport vehicles from the Bill denies disabled people access to transport. The Government's record on initiatives in that area is second to none.” (3)

However, during the passage of the Bill, the Government was forced to accept what became Part V of the 1995 Act covering public transport, including powers to make access regulations about vehicles, carriage of passengers in taxis, etc. This resulted, among other things, in the Passenger Service Vehicle Accessibility Regulations (PSVAR) being introduced in the year 2000. 
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There have undoubtedly been significant improvements in public transport access in the past 25 years (look at how low floor buses have transformed much local travel) but many problems remain.  Although the second (2005) DDA put right the exemption of transport services generally from the ‘Part III provisions', the exclusion of transport in the 1995 Act cost disabled people a decade of improvements in access to transport; the consequences of which we still live with today.

However, blind people have expressed serious concerns about the concept of continuous pavements, which RNIB oppose. As the RNIB says, the problem is that they “pitch us, without warning, into a shared space without knowing it.”

The London Cycling Design Standards acknowledge these concerns, saying that continuous pavements “should currently be regarded as experimental in the UK. Further development of the concept is needed, in consultation with access groups, to determine acceptable approaches, given concerns over the lack of delineation between the footway and the area accessible to vehicles that runs over the entry treatment. Any proposal should be subject to an Equality Impact Assessment.” (P43)

So would the obvious design solution be to add tactile paving to continuous paving, to warn a visually impaired pedestrian that they are entering a space where they may encounter a vehicle? My hunch is that many advocates of continuous pavements would resist the use of tactile paving in such situations on the grounds that it would signal, to both pedestrian and driver, that walking priority is limited. Rather than walking across the side road with full confidence, a pedestrian should pause and check that vehicles aren’t turning into or out of the side road, undermining the ‘people over vehicles’ philosophy. Tactile paving also can inhibit the mobility of other disabled pedestrians, so it should not be over-used.​

But on many ordinary pavements, there is already a risk of encountering a vehicle every few yards - where there are driveways or garages. The reality is that many pavements are already ‘shared space’ to some degree, as is every crossing of a side road. Would anyone expect tactile paving to be installed every time a driveway crossed a pavement? (Saughton Road North, Edinburgh).

So, should continuous pavements have tactile paving? The answer is probably “it depends”. As with so many other aspects of street design, each site really needs to be designed specific to the context, especially taking account of traffic (volume and speed).

As the DfT is at last reviewing the woefully out of date guidance on ‘Inclusive Mobility’ and tactile paving it is timely to give this some serious thought. It would be useful to have detailed national guidance, based on both research and consultation on if, where and when tactile paving is required on a continuous pavement.

So the *total* number of injuries to pedestrians caused by collisions with cyclists is considerably higher than the ‘1%’ figure often quoted (for fatalities). I would imagine by a factor of at least 3; possibly as high as 5 or more?  Of course, this is still very low compared to crashes involving motor vehicles, which are overwhelmingly responsible for pedestrian (and cyclist) casualties. So does it matter if cycling accounts for 1%, 3% or 5% of pedestrian collisions? Yes, I think it does. 
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Firstly, selective cherry-picking of statistics discredits the basically sound argument that the  principal focus of road safety efforts should be on motor vehicles (rather than cyclists).

Secondly, we need to recognise the anxiety that cycling can cause pedestrians. While there seems to be little statistical or academic evidence on this, there can be no question that inconsiderate cycling - especially on pavements, or through pedestrian crossings - seriously intimidates many pedestrians; especially those who are blind, deaf, old or generally less confident and steady on their feet. Indeed, Peter Walker acknowledges in his video that pavement cycling can intimidate; but in the next breath describes it as “harmless”. 
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While it is wrong for the media and politicians to disproportionately focus on cyclists’ involvement in pedestrian collisions, it is also wrong for cycling advocates to simply dismiss the impact of inconsiderate cycling as negligible or irrelevant. A little more empathy from some cycling campaigners - such as on the lines of Suzanne Forup’s excellent recent blog  - would not go amiss; it might also do more to win wider public support for more investment in cycling.

There has been a lot of discussion about the number of buses on Edinburgh’s Princes Street, and the idea of removing some or all of them as part of moves to reduce traffic in the city centre. (See here for my thoughts on the subject). However, I’ve seen very little discussion about taxis. When private traffic on Princes Street was first restricted 20 odd years ago, most council officials wanted taxis banned entirely but after lobbying by the taxi trade, this idea was dropped. It would be timely to revisit the matter. 

​Thousands of taxis use Princes Street each day - my surveys suggested that they could form more more than a quarter of all vehicles on the street. But many taxis carry no passengers at all. I carried out a count of how many passengers occupied 50 taxis in the block between Frederick and Hanover Streets in half an hour on the morning of 2 April. Just over half the taxis passing had no passengers, with the driver either plying for hire, or off duty.  Only 9 (18%) carried more than one passenger. The average occupancy of all taxis was 0.7 people (excluding the driver, obviously). More detailed surveys of different parts of the street and at different times are needed to establish better data, but these results raise important questions. Is this an efficient way to move people in the city centre? Is this the best use of the premium space that is Princes Street? Removing taxis would reduce congestion and pollution, speed up buses and make cycling safer.​

Motability has been criticised again by the House of Commons Work and Pensions and Treasury Committees at evidence taken on 9 January. This follows publication of the recent report by the National Audit Office (NAO) which broadly endorsed the criticisms of executive pay, reserves and governance. Senior figures in both the Motability Charity and its commercial arm Motability Operations say they accept all the NAO recommendations - while appearing at the same time to justify all their actions. Some words used by MPs included “evasiveness”, “lack of transparency”, “defensiveness”. NAO’s head, Sir Amyas Morse, concluded his evidence by saying “there does need to be change”. 

Three observations: Firstly, risk management is fundamental to the business, and Motability Operations makes much of its “dynamic and robust approach” to managing risks (lots more like this screenshot in the Annual Report). So how didn't it spot the very obvious reputational and political risks currently resulting from its remuneration and reserves policies? They were surely not hard to foresee…

Local service buses again formed less than half of all traffic in Princes Street, with other significant vehicles including tourist buses and especially taxis. Many of these vehicles don’t stop at all on Princes Street, using it simply as a short cut thoroughfare. If reducing traffic on Princes Street is a key aim (as it appears to be as part of the ‘City Centre Transformation initiative’), wouldn't it make sense to look at removing such traffic first?​

Another thought on street clutter...although widely recognised as a significant problem for pedestrians (both because it reduces the available space for walking and because it can represent a serious hazard for some people, most obviously those with visual impairments) what is less widely acknowledged is the apparent effect that street clutter has on attracting other clutter.