What is the issue?
The Healthy Streets Scorecard is all about improving health and wellbeing for everyone in London.
All of the current indicators are important for accessibility, but without specific accessibility indicators, Disabled people’s mobility is not being supported as well by the Healthy Streets Scorecard as it should be.
We want to improve how the Healthy Streets Scorecard works for Disabled people by including meaningful, specific, accessibility indicators.
What are we doing?
This year, we’ve been researching options for a meaningful accessibility indicator. All of the current indicators use strong data and measurements which help drive improvements within and between boroughs. The data needs to be available – through boroughs, or national datasets.
An accessibility indicator needs to work in the same way, with available data, that gives a clear measurement, which can lead to real improvements.
For accessibility indicators, there are two key areas we’d like to pursue:
- Pavement accessibility;
- Access for Disabled people who need to use private motor vehicles.
Pavement accessibility
Indicators for pavements such as clear width, fixed and moveable obstructions, surface quality, gradients including crossfall, and provision of safe crossing points at junctions and on desire lines have been considered. All these measures are incredibly important for accessibility, and desperately need highlighting as they are far too often neglected.
We’re talking to a range of organisations to try to work out how to get good enough data to develop an indicator any of these important accessibility measures. We will continue working with boroughs to improve the accessibility of all current and future schemes.
We hope that it will be possible to include a pavement accessibility indicator in future, through more collaboration and as street-level mapping and data management tools improve.
Private motor vehicle access for Disabled people
Our investigations have considered measures such as availability of wheelchair-accessible taxis and private hire vehicles, exemptions and access through CCTV-controlled traffic filters, and parking options for Disabled people.
The option which we feel has the great potential to make a big difference to many Disabled people and which should be simple for boroughs to implement, is aligning Blue Badge parking rules with good practice guidance.
Why is Blue Badge parking provision important?
Disabled people make around 38% fewer journeys each year than non-Disabled people. A large part of this mobility gap is due to the inaccessibility of our streets and to Disabled people having insufficient access to suitable mobility options.
We know that many Disabled people are unable to drive and may have no reasonable access to being driven. But for a significant proportion of Disabled people, driving or being driven for journeys is the only feasible way to make journeys – including journeys which may be considered very short by most non-Disabled people.
Being able to park very close to a destination may be the only way to be physically active at all – for example, by walking or wheeling at a destination (shops; indoor or outdoor leisure venues, health care centres). This means that many Disabled people need suitable parking spaces to be reliably available.
Improving the liveability of our streets, walking/wheeling and cycling access and public transport access are essential. And so is ensuring that Disabled people have the option to use private vehicles including private cars, vans and taxis.
What are the rules for Blue Badge parking?
Some of the rules for Blue Badge parking are set nationally. Other rules are set by local authorities – in London, by the boroughs.
Importantly, residents’ parking bays and other local authority parking areas with restrictions have rules set by local authorities:
Boroughs that allow Blue Badge holders to park in residents’ parking bays (sometimes with time limits) include: Bromley, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Hounslow, Hammersmith and Fulham, Lambeth, Redbridge.
Boroughs that do not allow Blue Badge holders to park in residents’ parking bays include: Greenwich, Hillingdon, Lewisham.
These rules can make a big difference to how easy it is for Disabled people to make journeys in an area using private vehicles, including taxis.
Different local authorities also have different numbers of Disabled people living, working and visiting in their areas, different numbers of Disabled people who use private vehicles in the area, different street layouts with different numbers of Disabled and other parking spaces.
Blue Badges are issued by local authorities – and each will issue different numbers of Blue Badges based on slightly different criteria.
Restrictions at CCTV-controlled filters such as bus-only entrances may also allow no Blue Badge holders, all Blue Badge holders or some local Blue Badge holders through – again, generally decided locally by councils.
Central London boroughs have additional parking restrictions, via different badge schemes in different colours.
The different rules for Blue Badge parking in different boroughs are very confusing, and make working out how to make journeys much more stressful and time-consuming for Disabled people than it should be.
Encouraging action
We want to see Disabled people permitted to park, without charge, in all residents’ permit bays and in all borough-run car parks across London, with the exception of the current additional restricted central London areas.
We’re calling on all London boroughs to align their rules with good accessibility practice, creating a single, London-wide standard for Blue Badge parking rules.
Implementing a single, clear set of rules will enable Disabled people to make journeys and park without fear of either being unable to find any suitable parking, or of being fined for accidentally breaching the current, complex rules.
We will be talking with boroughs to promote these measures, and hope to see changes within the coming year: Simple rules changes and ongoing consideration during development of new schemes would progressively improve access to parking and travel options for Disabled people across London, at the same time that access to active travel and public transport are also improved.
In the end, this is all about ensuring that everyone has equitable options for using all the public spaces in our capital city.
Main image: Photo by Jakub Pabis on Unsplash
Blog post by: Wheels for Wellbeing
Wheels for Wellbeing exists to enhance disabled people’s lives by ensuring that anyone can access the physical, emotional, practical and social benefits of cycling.
