HADRIAN TOOLS: i-JOURNEY (Inclusive Journey Planner)
The HADRIAN team have also created the i-Journey tool, an innovative web interface which improves the accessibility of existing internet journey planners. Web based journey planners can play an important role in making public transport more accessible. Not only do they show the user what is available, they can also reduce uncertainty and enable preparation for what the journey involves. This can be particularly important for people with disabilities that affect their mobility. The i-Journey (Inclusive Journey Planner) prototype demonstrates how journey planners could be developed to fulfil their potential as tools for inclusion.
The team consulted widely with potential end users in order to refine the i-journey tool. Interviews and trials with inexperienced users with a range of capabilities led to a number of specific design recommendations for the improvement of existing journey planners. The majority of these recommendations form three main development concepts:
- Optimised Personalisation: the provision of existing and new options that a user would actually wish to use based upon their needs
- Genuine Journey Choice: a choice of journey that actually reflects different transport modes and variants not just choice based upon a different time of travel
- Rich Journey Plans: a fully detailed yet clear and concise plan of the journey is presented with real time updates on service availability, costs, weather, issues on crowding etc.
The i-Journey prototype has been designed to demonstrate how these concepts can be realised and will act as a source of guidance and inspiration for practitioners in the transport realm and in particular those with responsibility for transport or journey planning.
The i-Journey prototype is available through the AUNT-SUE website. Whilst it is not a working journey planner (changes to inputs will not affect the outputs page) it acts as a guidance tool to drive the development of planning solutions. The i-Journey Design Guide (http://www.pete-davis.co.uk/aunt-sue/) explains the recommendations and rationale behind the three main concepts. Developers can use the tool to develop a set of rules that can be used to understand and visualise the content that should be displayed to users and how that content should be presented. HARIAN is working with Transport for London to develop the tool.
For more details contact Dr Russell Marshall (Email: R.Marshall@lboro.ac.uk) or visit www.aunt-sue.info.
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HADRIAN TOOLS: Journey Stresstimator
Making a journey can put a variety of demands on a person wishing to travel. These demands may take many forms and all of them have the potential to exclude people from using public transport. A range of physical, sensory, cognitive, and emotional factors affect how people with different abilities, ages, genders, ethnicities and socioeconomic status use public transport. One unifying perspective for all of these issues is stress. The HADRIAN Journey Stresstimator has been developed to simulate the experiences of people over a whole journey and identify areas that are potential stressors.
All elements of a journey that could lead to exclusion can be treated as stressors and it is the ability of people to cope with those stressors that determines whether they are at risk of being excluded. The HADRIAN Journey Stresstimator makes use of the HADRIAN database of 102 real people, including 59 with various disabilities, to enable modelling of discrete physical interactions that are based on the complex limitations of real people rather than generic population data. The Stresstimator works by comparing stressors that feature in a particular journey with the known capabilities, behaviours and emotional responses of the 102 individuals within HADRIAN. This simulates the stress levels that these people would experience throughout the journey.
The Stresstimator is intended for use by transport and urban environment practitioners and students in relevant fields. It is best used for quick initial assessments of the accessibility of public transport routes. It may be used for overall comparison of alternative routes, to identify problematic journey stages, to target major causes of exclusion for further investigation or to gain an understanding of how different people are differently affected by aspects of a journey.
The Stresstimator is a Microsoft Excel add-on, which can be used by anyone with experience using spreadsheets. It requires minimal pre-use data capture (based on elements that are easily observed in the journey), takes just a few minutes to use and provides result summaries that allow different levels of analysis. When analysing the results, it is useful to cross-reference with the HADRIAN Database to gain a greater understanding of the participants that may be excluded. Any problems that are identified will require further interrogation, for which other tools developed by the AUNT-SUE project may be useful.
For more details contact Dr Russell Marshall (Email: R.Marshall@lboro.ac.uk) or visit www.aunt-sue.info.
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VISIT : Visualising Safe & Inclusive Transport Environments
In principle, the entry points to public transport should be welcoming gateways, accessible to everyone. In reality, many are not. AUNT-SUE research group VISIT, based at London Met, believe that where opportunities arise to upgrade and re-build transport environments, we must get it right. VISIT addressed this challenge through live schemes in London where improvements to access and inclusion were explicit objectives, drawing on international comparisons and best practice, eg in Stuttgart, South West Germany.
VISIT combined AUNT-SUE tools and resources to model alternative scenarios, and assess the impact of proposed designs – for example on people of different ages and levels of confidence. The research focused on spaces in and around the nodes of public transport from bus/tram stops to areas in and around large multi-modal interchanges. Key ‘products’ developed through VISIT include:
- Adaptation of Geographic Information Systems for Participation (GIS-P), to enable users to express their views and preferences on an equal footing with professionals that offer specialist expertise
- Case study collaboration with the HADRIAN design-for-all research team to inform improvements for passengers on Docklands Light Railway
- Application of a GIS-based ‘whole journey’ audit tool to help design pedestrian environments that are safer and more secure
- 2D and 3D visualisation to help practitioners design out crime/ fear of crime
Case Study Areas, chosen by VISIT to illustrate a range of transport nodes, included:
- Docklands Light Railway (DLR): The stations and their catchment areas, where action is being taken to improve access and personal security, including upgrades at Greenwich, Poplar and West India Quay.
- Finsbury Park: Proposed improvements to Overground, Underground, bus and bike interchange in North London.
- King’s Cross / St Pancras International: Pedestrian routes around London’s busiest interchange. The study assessed the implications for nearby neighbourhoods whose residents experience social and economic disadvantage.
The team identified key stakeholders, conditions and drivers of change in case study areas and then developed a ‘Map-walk’ (transect walk) technique to enable residents to articulate their experiences of everyday journeys that they made on foot, and to discuss improvements. This consultation included those that public agencies considered ‘hard-to-reach’ by more traditional consultation. The aim was to enable participants to frame the issues, problems and suggested solutions in their own terms by annotating large-scale maps with ‘speech bubbles’ individually, and then together as a Panel. The annotated paper maps that they produced were digitised and designed so that their valuable local insights could be interpreted and acted upon by decision-makers and specialists responsible for carrying out improvements.
In this way VISIT has addressed a critical question for transport providers: how can good intentions be translated into good outcomes that create more inclusive passenger environments? The research team reviewed techniques that practitioners (especially planners, urban designers and project managers) currently use to visualise changes that have the potential to reduce the barriers to access and inclusion in public spaces and transport. VISIT enabled researchers to evaluate the application of AUNT-SUE tools and resources to help people evaluate how things are, and visualise how they might be, and thus inform more inclusive design outcomes within ‘real world’ constraints.
For further details visit www.aunt-sue.info or contact g.evans@londonmet.ac.uk.
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Street Design Indicator
Although traffic engineering has dominated transport related policy in the past, attention to the value and impact of urban design and the street environment has increased over the last decade. The pedestrian journey is particularly important in reducing social exclusion and removing barriers to access and public transport usage, not least for groups who are more walking reliant like older and younger people. In order to enable designers and planners to model the urban environment more comprehensively, AUNT SUE has developed a Geographic Information System (GIS) based Street Design Indicator (SDI) to understand how its diverse features can affect users' perceptions of streets and public areas. It can be used to identify areas that are perceived negatively by pedestrians and so have the potential to restrict their movements.
The development of the SDI started with a review and synthesis of current good practice and guidance, and developed a conceptual model of the journey environment. Drawing on the techniques developed from various accessibility, crime prevention and design quality guidance and tools, the AUNT-SUE street design indicator (SDI) widens the scope to include perceptual factors such as fear of crime and natural surveillance; key amenities such as WCs, furniture, signage and legibility; and uses a more comprehensive mapping of neighbourhoods, communities and routes.
Consultation with residents and stakeholders such as the local police, council officers and local organisations was also undertaken. This entailed household surveys using questionnaires and focus groups with residents using large scale maps (GIS-Participation technique) allowing residents to express areas of safety and problem routes, as well as mark out their key travel behaviour and aspirations. Recommendations that arose included moving and combining bus stops, extending bus routes, reducing road traffic, providing more local amenities such as local food shops and community facilities, and reducing further development/densities. Based on the key finding that ‘safety’ was the prime barrier to householders undertaking pedestrian journeys, AUNT SUE has undertaken further testing of the importance of street design features addressing fear of crime through two theoretically informed approaches – Broken Windows and Prospect/Refuge. This research is outlined below.
For further details visit www.aunt-sue.info or contact g.evans@londonmet.ac.uk
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Street Environment Index
Fear of crime when walking in a local neighbourhood forms an important factor in social exclusion and occurs when people cannot access services or activities that others take for granted, acting as a limiting factor in their lives. Fear forms an important component of social exclusion, with over 11% of the general public saying that they would travel more if they felt safer on the transport system. Whilst crime and safety within transport (on board, at stations and bus stops) has received attention from police and transport operators (eg CCTV, security), safety and crime in the journey to and from transport hubs is a greater barrier to access, particularly for women.
Thus the ability to identify locations where fear of crime is felt by pedestrians, and target improvements to these areas, would be useful for Local Authorities and transport planners. Maps of such locations would allow Local Authorities to focus on improving such areas, and as a consequence perhaps reducing the social exclusion experienced by some residents of the area whose fear of crime when walking in their neighbourhood limits their access to activities others take for granted.
In response to this, AUNT-SUE researchers at London Metropolitan University have developed the Street Environment Index (SEI) which attempts to predict the level of fear of crime felt by pedestrians in an area, and to highlight hotspots of fear of crime.
Two approaches to the systematic modelling of fear of crime were tested:
Mapping Fear using Urban Features
The first approach was based on the associated concepts of ‘New Urbanism’ and ‘Broken Windows Theory’. New Urbanism encourages an open network of streets that are accessible and friendly to pedestrians – the presence of pedestrians on the street in turn reduces the opportunity for crime to be committed. Broken Windows Theory suggests that when a window is broken in an area and not repaired, this leads to a gradual withdrawal of people from the street, increasing the opportunity for further disorder (such as graffiti) to take place unobserved and hence leading to further withdrawal of pedestrians. Such disorder thus becomes an indicator of a ‘fearful’ location – i.e. a location where there are few pedestrians and where no-one will intervene should a pedestrian need help.
The SEI uses a Geographical Information System (GIS) to map disorder in a neighbourhood. Isovists (which map the area visible from a particular point) are used to identify the disorder visible at each location in the test area, along with other factors that impact the likelihood of a pedestrian being observed, such as fences and windows. A GIS-Participation (GIS-P) process was then used to validate the results obtained, with residents indicating on paper maps areas where they felt safe, neutral and scared.
The methodology developed provides a very useful mechanism to assess the general environment of a particular area in terms of its appearance. It compares favourably with other assessment processes due to its objectivity, its inclusivity, the novel use of Isovists and importantly the opportunity to re-use existing datasets held by Local Authorities. The model can also be expanded to include any number of features.
Mapping Fear using Prospect Refuge Theory
Prospect/Refuge theory suggests that the levels of fear of crime felt by a pedestrian depend both on the openness of the space around them (the prospect) and the number of hiding places for potential attackers (refuges).
Again using the Isovists (which map the area visible from a particular point), the amount of prospect visible at a particular point was determined, provide a polygon showing the visible extent from the perspective of the pedestrian. Refuges were captured in the test area of Somers Town, L.B. Camden by a manual data capture process, and were then digitised as points in a Geographical Information System (GIS). A measure of fear of crime for each point on the ground in the testbed area was generated by classifying each Isovist by area (into 5 categories) and counting the number of refuges in each Isovist. A GIS-Participation (GIS-P) process was again used to validate the results obtained, with residents of Somers Town being asked to indicate on paper maps areas where they felt safe, neutral and fearful.
Prospect/Refuge theory could provide a simple method of identifying the more fearful locations in an area, as the data collection required is minimal, provided topographic base mapping data is available showing buildings and other features. This digital data is increasingly available and used by local authorities, the police and others.
For further details visit www.aunt-sue.info or contact g.evans@londonmet.ac.uk
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