On Low Floors & Wheelchairs

This is a guest post by regular commenter and reader RC169. If you want to write a guest post for this blog, check here.

Now that the dust is beginning to settle on the incident with the First Manchester driver who apparently refused to operate his ramp for a wheelchair using passenger, it is opportune to look at the broader issues raised by the incident, and the manner in which it was made public.

The Technology

The possibility for wheelchair users to travel on buses has developed over the last 15 or 20 years, with the introduction of the current generation of ‘low floor’ buses, although buses with step-free floors were available more than 50 years ago. The Bristol Lodekka F-Series; and the Daimler Fleetline offered this type of layout, generally for lowheight buses. Some operators, however, took advantage of the flat floor potential to provided increased headroom on highbridge vehicles (e.g. Bournemouth Corporation); and, perhaps, also because they saw value in the absence of steps. In 1962, a vehicle purpose designed as a single decker also offered this layout—the Daimler Roadliner—but it was plagued by reliability problems and therefore sold poorly and never achieved its potential.

All of the rear-engined designs offering a step-free floor did nonetheless require an incline to enable the floor to clear the front axle, and during the later 1960s and early 1970s, this design seemed to fall out of favour, and a layout involving a small extra step to a level floor which incorporated the area where a passenger stood to pay their fare, and the gangway, gained greater acceptance. The BristolVRT/ECW combination, which replaced the Lodekka, incorporated such a small step; and the Leyland National single decker had a similar layout with a slightly deeper step. One is drawn to the conclusion that the inclines of the step-free floors were not so satisfactory from a passenger comfort and safety perspective; and there does not seem to have been any attempt to exploit the potential of the step-free floors to enable the carriage of wheelchairs. The successor generation vehicles (such as the Leyland Lynx and Olympian) did not, as far as I am aware, offer the step-free floor.

The stepped layout of vehicles such as the Leyland National or Bristol VRT can in fact be modified with the addition of a lifting mechanism to allow carriage of wheelchairs. Southampton City Transport converted a couple of Leyland Atlanteans in this way to provide vehicles for a service specially designed for wheelchair users in the mid 1980s; while similar conversions were carried out to some Mercedes-Benz O405 single deckers in the south west German city of Heidelberg for use on normal services. Some coaches and other current generation buses still use lifts of this nature to facilitate the carriage of wheelchairs.

The current generation of ‘low floor’ buses are not so very different in layout from their predecessors, but this time the potential to enable carriage of wheelchairs has been exploited, in particular in the late 1980s by manufacturers in Germany such as Neoplan. This was probably as much a result of political pressure as the availability of technology. The idea spread to other countries, including the UK, where politicians saw an opportunity to grant some ‘wishes’, and enshrined the requirement to provide facilities for wheelchairs on bus services in law, given that the necessary technology was (apparently) now available.

From my perspective, as I reported almost two years ago following a visit to London with my wife (who is a wheelchair user), the reality is rather different. The politicians in London have tried to go one better than their national counterparts, and bring in a universally wheelchair accessible network of buses several years before the national deadline. Unfortunately the technology does not seem to be mature or reliable enough – this includes wider aspects such as the suspension and general ride quality of the vehicles in intensive urban service. In contrast, our experience with the human elements of the system was largely satisfactory. My wife considers that buses are satisfactory for short journeys, but the situation in London meant that some quite lengthy journeys were necessary. If the investment had been redistributed in favour of the Underground, so that (for example) every second or third station was made wheelchair accessible, a far more satisfactory result would have been achieved; but, at the time of our visit (Autumn 2008), very few stations were accessible, particularly on the older lines in the suburbs.

It is not sensible to think that the clock might be turned back, so it is essential that the suppliers of the technology work to improve it, in particular the suspension systems of buses, although I accept that it is almost inevitable that a road vehicle will subject its passengers to more vertical and sideways motion than a rail-borne vehicle.

To be continued...