Paper presented at the Rural Transport for All Seminar

Lancaster University, July 1999

Accessible Public Transport in Rural Areas

by Nick Tyler

Abstract

The Accessible Public Transport in Rural Areas (APTRA) Project was devised at UCL to investigate ways of addressing users’ needs for public transport in rural areas. The project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the approach is to install some public transport in a remote rural area and observe the ways in which people make use of the new facility.

It is essential to ensure that this public transport service is fully accessible and presents as few barriers as possible to potential users, especially older people and those with difficulties travelling around. Another key ingredient of the project is to ensure that the needs of the local people are addressed as far as possible. This requires extensive consultation with the local communities.

This paper describes the setting up of the project, the issues of consultation, the design of the vehicle and the resulting service. Some early indications of how the local communities are using the service are given. The project has set out to confront several conventional myths about public transport in rural areas - the routing and scheduling strategy, the publicity, the type of vehicle etc. - and the paper airs these in the context of current rural policy.

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