Pedestrian and multimodal route guidance adaptation for elderly citizens

The decomposition of the transportation task in sub-tasks and the estimation of the accessibility level of Public Transport (PT) means, forms an important input to various services that can be offered on-line, such as route guidance, personalized multimodal-trip planning and in general personalisation of infomobility services for travelers. The questions that need to be considered in such systems are which PT mean and which station is accessible for users with mobility restrictions, such as the elderly? The paper starts with a short introduction of the ACCESS 2 ALL project and the model, followed by a description of the role of the walking speed in providing route guidance info, as well as the tests plans and conditions for measuring a key accessibility attribute, the elderly users walking speed and endurance. The key functionality of a computer-based tool is explained, providing a reliable pedestrian, as well as multimodal route guidance for mobility impaired (MI) travelers and accessibility information for PT service providers and operators. Finally, some thoughts on the business benefits of the accessibility attributes inclusion in transportation information systems, are introduced.