FOREWORD

Communicating with Persons with Disabilities in a Multimodal Transit Environment: A Synthesis of Transit Practice

By Staff
Transportation
Research Board

This synthesis will be of interest to transit agency professionals and the consultants who work with them in dealing with travelers with disabilities. These are travelers with sensory, vision, hearing, and cognitive impairments who need alternative methods for accessing and processing the transit information that is now being commonly provided to the general public. The report describes current North American transit practice in information and communication technologies, as well as operations, implementation, and human factor issues. Attention is given to information and communication technologies related to planning, customer service, marketing, and training that can improve the travel experience for all persons traveling in a transit environment. The focus is on the communication techniques and technologies for persons with sensory and cognitive disabilities.

Administrators, practitioners, and researchers are continually faced with issues or problems on which there is much information, either in the form of reports or in terms of undocumented experience and practice. Unfortunately, this information often is scattered or not readily available in the literature, and, as a consequence, in seeking solutions, full information on what has been learned about an issue or problem is not assembled. Costly research findings may go unused, valuable experience may be overlooked, and full consideration may not be given to the available methods of solving or alleviating the issue or problem. In an effort to correct this situation, the Transit Cooperative Research Program (TCRP) Synthesis Project, carried out by the Transportation Research Board as the research agency, has the objective of reporting on common transit issues and problems and synthesizing available information. The synthesis reports from this endeavor constitute a TCRP publication series in which various forms of relevant information are assembled into single, concise documents pertaining to a specific problem or closely related issues.

This document from the Transportation Research Board integrates information from a literature review, survey responses from 19 transit agencies, and extensive telephone interviews with seven specific providers.

To develop this synthesis in a comprehensive manner and to ensure inclusion of significant knowledge, available information was assembled from numerous sources, including a number of public transportation agencies. A topic panel of experts in the subject area was established to guide the researchers in organizing and evaluating the collected data, and to review the final synthesis report.

This synthesis is an immediately useful document that records practices that were acceptable within the limitations of the knowledge available at the time of its preparation. As the processes of advancement continue, new knowledge can be expected to be added to that now at hand.