Exploring transportation equity issues for persons with disabilities: The impact of gender on mobility and accessibility indicators

Introduction

Persons with disabilities still face numerous barriers in their everyday lives, especially in transportation. The problem of access to transportation is identified through fewer daily trips and more barriers in public transport. These problems indicate transportation equity issues among persons with disabilities. Another issue recognized in previous studies was a gender imbalance in the samples that could indicate gender equality problems among persons with disabilities. This paper aims to investigate mobility and accessibility indicators among persons with disabilities, with a particular emphasis on the impact of gender, in order to explore two critical transportation equity issues: inclusivity and social justice.

Methods

The mobility and accessibility indicators analyzed in this research were the Number of daily trips, Mobility satisfaction, Infrastructure accessibility satisfaction, and Modal distributions of daily trips. The data about indicators was collected by an online version of a questionnaire. The research was performed on 100 persons with disabilities from Serbia, equally distributed by gender. The most common recorded diagnosis of the respondents was spinal cord injury.

Results

In general, respondents made 3.26 trips per day. At two transportation modes, we identified significant differences between males and females. Males frequently tripped as passenger car drivers, and females often traveled as passengers in passenger cars. Additionally, nine Bayesian linear regression models with weak informative prior distributions brought much helpful information.

Conclusions

The obtained results bring stakeholders valuable information in creating policies, practices, and recommendations to achieve specific goals related to transportation equity. Improving flexibility and time efficiency of females’ trips and resolving the problem of females’ fear of abuse and harassment in taxi cars were recognized as the two most critical topics.