Accessibility Strategy
This section highlights the key themes of our approach. Details are set out in ‘Accessibility Strategy Statement’.
Accessibility planning tackles the problems of disadvantaged groups and areas and promotes social inclusion. It concentrates on access to opportunities that are likely to have most impact on life chances: employment, education, health care and fresh food shops.
These opportunities are seen as important in the Community Plans or Strategies for all seven Metropolitan Authorities, so the Accessibility Strategy, set out in the Annexe, addresses them as high-level objectives.
Our Accessibility Strategy is based on a three-level approach:
- strategic-level analytical evidence produced by the Accession software
- discussions with Local Strategic Partnerships, Primary Care Trusts, Local Education Authorities and providers of transport for people who cannot use conventional public transport
- building on work underway or recently completed in disadvantaged areas such as Regeneration Zones
Current Position
Strategic Travel Time mapping shows that there is generally good accessibility in most places at most times for the 33.7% (2001) of households without a car, due to the extensive bus network. Two strategic 'accessibility gaps' have been identified and we have set the following targets to focus on these :
- increase the number of people attending job interviews per year via access initiatives from 1,150 in 2005 to 2,300 by 2011
- increase the total population within 30 minutes inter-peak travel time of a main NHS hospital by "accessible" public transport from the 2005 baseline of 580,000 by 50% by 2011
Work in respect of the first target will focus on joint working with Job Centre Plus to develop our 'Workwise' scheme. For the second target, we will focus our bus improvement programme, in partnership with operators in problem areas.
The consultation and partnership working has identified other barriers to accessibility that are possibly more important than travel time, including:
- cost
- personal security
- lack of easy-to-understand travel information
- reliability of services
The groups most affected include:
- people with learning difficulties
- people with mobility problems
- Senior Citizens
- people without English as their first language
Our approach is to work in partnership to help overcome these broader problems as part of a coordinated response to accessibility problems. This will include discussions with key groups as identified above as well as using detailed analytical work undertaken in key areas. Potential solutions will be developed as action plans to ensure a corporate approach to resolving problems. It is anticipated that the measures set out in the Bus Strategy for tackling personal security, understandable information and service reliability will be targeted to locations identified as having particular accessibility problems.