Transportation Accessibility Resources

 

Transportation accessibility is a key area for disability rights and advocacy and impacts disabled people around the globe. Transportation Resilience, Accessibility & Climate Sustainability (TRACS) was a disability-led research project regarding transportation accessibility issues and potential solutions.

TRACS Research & Community Engagement Project

TRACS (Transportation Resilience, Accessibility & Climate Sustainability) was created by a partnership between the World Institute on Disability and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) as a research and community engagement project. We’ve completed this two-and-half year project and now are pleased to present our findings and resources.

Our overall goal has been to stimulate connection and communication between the community of seniors & people with disabilities together with the transportation system– the agencies in the region local to the San Francisco bay, served by MTC. We hope for these communities to work together for optimal mobility and enjoyable use by users of the existing services, as well as to improve the accessibility of these services. Our slogan is “Ensuring Access is Everyone’s Responsibility.”

Improving these systems will require action and engagement. There are no “watch-dog” systems for accessibility even those proscribed by law. This is true for all disability rights policies and regulations. People in the community must connect and communicate their needs and expectations to services agencies and the officials responsible for them. There are many ways to do this, which we offer here.

TRACS began our process with investigating and documenting the state of accessibility of our local transportation systems. We created an active ten-member Policy Advisory Group, then moved forward with conducting interviews, focus groups, surveys and workshops, to offer information and invite input from all our stakeholder communities.

Our results are presented in the many documents on this site. We offer reports on our findings, and a multiplicity of resources and tools for use in a wide range of ways. All of these documents are downloadable. We strongly encourage wide sharing of the contents of this site.

Project Description

TRACS was a 2.5-year research, policy analysis and public education initiative to improve collaboration between transportation agencies and people with disabilities in the 9-county San Francisco Bay Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma) This project has been funded through the “Sustainable Communities” focus of Caltrans SB1 Grant program.

We thank our project sponsor, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) as well as our Policy Advisory Group, staff, and all our program participants, for their commitment to accessibility.

Staff:
Marsha Saxton, TRACS Project Director, World Institute on Disability
Drennen Shelton, Shimon Israel, Metropolitan Transportation Commission

Introduction to Transportation Access and the Disability Rights Movement

Interested in having WID design a study like this for you?

We can help! Check out our Research Service offerings, listed on our Services page.