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Barriers To Disabled Accessibility

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A further policy measure to facilitate mitigations is the legislation available to the ORR, and whilst as this paper details there are still significant barriers to disabled accessibility, the mitigations are being developed and subject to increasing focus to improve the disabled rail experience – the ORR having a clearly defined policy objective of “Empowering confident use of the railway by disabled passengers and promoting awareness of the advice and help available” (ORR, 2014). To date, regulation and legislation has provided the traditional vehicle for driving changes in approach to tackling transport accessibility (Karekle, Fujiyama and Tyler, 2011), however going forward this needs to be considered as part of a package of measures …show more content…

This will lead to the unlocking of not just economic benefits but also social benefits (Duckenfield, 2017), with the Duckenfield (2017) study identifying that the ongoing “Access for All” programme of interventions has a positive business case
3) Incentivisation and legislation of private investment in accessibility.
Linked in with the policy tools available to central government as one of the means of mitigating accessibility is the ability to mandate accessibility improvements through future franchise specifications. This is called for in the Papworth Trust report into improving accessibility to rail travel for disabled passengers and would see the standardisation of accessibility provision across the different private train operating companies that provide services across the UK, which currently leads to variable quality of disabled service provision across information availability, staffing of stations and small scale physical interventions at stations to improve mobility (Papworth Trust, 2015).
Furthermore through encouraging modal shift, the train operating companies would experience an increase in revenue associated with both increased demand

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