A Research-Community Partnership to Enhance the Potential of Travel Instruction Services for People Living with Disabilities - More than thirty years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, access to safe, reliable, and accessible public transportation remains elusive for many Americans living with disabilities. Transportation access is critical for independent community living, including employment opportunities, and has the potential to influence a range of health and quality of life outcomes. Public transportation agencies are mandated by federal legislation to provide accessibility accommodations to riders with disabilities and offer complementary paratransit for people who cannot access fixed-route services due to a disability. Despite this, prior research has demonstrated that people with disabilities continue to experience inaccessible conditions on public transit, including inadequate communication about routes and schedules, broken or absent accessible features, and discriminatory attitudes. Furthermore, people with disabilities who rely on paratransit services have reported that this limits their community activity, as these services typically must be scheduled in advance. These barriers to community participation must be addressed to enable full societal inclusion for people with disabilities.
Travel instruction programs are frequently employed initiatives that aim to empower people with disabilities to travel independently on fixed-route public transit services through individualized curricula that address problem-solving skills, accessibility advocacy, and self-efficacy. Despite being employed by community programs for decades, there is a dearth of research on the effectiveness of travel instruction models for enabling independent transportation use and improving community participation among people with disabilities. Community-based programs at the forefront of these services frequently do not have the research capacity to systematically and rigorously evaluate their program design and service models. Partnerships between researchers and community programs have the potential to enhance the impact and sustainability of programs that address social problems, like pervasive transportation insecurity among people with disabilities.
The proposed project will establish a partnership between a team of disability outcomes researchers and a community-based organization that provides travel instruction services for people with disabilities. The investigative team will conduct an analysis of the travel instruction program’s existing administrative database to understand its efficacy in promoting independent public transit use among graduates. Next, the team will implement a stakeholder-driven approach to designing an outcomes questionnaire that can be administered to a sample of program graduates to understand the role of public transit use in their community participation. Finally, the team will systematically assess the characteristics of eligible people who decline to participate in the travel instruction program in order to understand the groups of people who are not accessing this service. The information obtained from this investigation will inform refinements to the travel instruction model, which can then be tested in a future initiative, so travel instruction organizations have the necessary evidence base to continue the work of empowering people with disabilities to live independently and addressing the critical need for transportation access equity.
