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OCR for page 169
The Role of Transportation
in the Social integration
of lithe Aged
Martin Wachs
Mobility, the ability to travel from place to place, is a basic
determinant of the quality of life in old age, yet it is often
overlooked in discussions of the social and built environment.
Perhaps this oversight occurs because mobility does not give us
satisfaction in its own right. Few people drive on freeways or
ride buses because they value these experiences; we value in-
stead excellent health care, housing, and recreational activities.
Mobility is valued, in turn, as a link to other elements of the
built and social environments. Thus, transportation may be the
means by which our environment conspires to isolate the elderly
or one of the keys to an active and healthy old age.
Just a century ago, the city was primarily a "walking city."
Most people walked between home and work, to do their shop-
ping, to schools and churches. Within a very short period of
time in fact, within the memory of many still living the city
has been transformed by transportation and communications
technology. First, streetcars enabled people to live and work in
separate quarters of the city. Later, trucks and telephones freed
businesses of their dependency on downtown locations. By 1930
the auto had become the primary means of transportation for
Martin Wachs is a professor in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban
Planning, University of California, Los Angeles.
169
OCR for page 170
170
MARTIN WACHS
most families, and the location and scale of shopping centers,
social activities, and human services have evolved to reflect
nearly universal access by means of the automobile. Low-density
residential areas, decentralized health care, diversified regional
shopping centers, and suburban office centers work quite well
for those who drive without difficulty. Yet these same structures
provide a harsh environment for people whose lives differ signif-
icantly from the norm of the suburban, auto-oriented household.
The very poor, ethnic minorities, disabled people, and many of
our elderly are isolated in a world that assumes that the two-
car, two-worker, two-child, two-story household in suburbia is
typical and caters only to it (Schaefer and ScIar, 19751.
Because travel in our society is largely derived from the pro-
duction and consumption of other goods and services and is
rarely an end in itself, we must be careful when interpreting
statistics about travel patterns. We can be pretty certain that a
household having less wealth and income than another is likely
to have a lesser degree of well-being, but it does not follow that
a household that travels less than another has a Tower degree of
mobility. A person's mobility should be judged by the extent to
which his or her need to travel is being met and not by how
much he or she travels in comparison with others. Surprisingly,
the fact that many old people travel less than many younger
people is often interpreted as a lack of mobility when it should
be obvious that relief from the traditional morning and evening
commute is for most people a blessing rather than a deprivation.
The critical question is not how much elderly people travel but
whether or not mobility limitations restrict their freedom of
choice and, hence, the quality of their lives. The following para-
graphs summarize some of the major differences between the
travel patterns of the elderly and other population groups, and
interpret these differences in an effort to gain greater under-
standing of the mobility patterns and needs of the elderly. Later
sections of the paper review national policies for improving the
mobility of the elderly in an effort to suggest some directions
for possible improvement, especially with respect to the integra-
tion of transportation requirements in the planning of housing
for the elderly.
OCR for page 171
TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
INTERPRETING TRAVEL BY THE ELDERLY AND
DETERMINING NEEDS
171
The 1977 Nationwide Personal Transportation Study (NPTS)
of more than 20,000 households shows that travel patterns
change dramatically during a person's life cycle. For example,
childless couples in their twenties on average make about four
trips per day totaling approximately 36 miles of travel. Travel
peaks among families with children and whose heads are in
their late thirties. Such families on average make a dozen trips
per day and travel nearly a hundred miles daily. Households of
very old people typically make the smallest number of trips per
day and travel the fewest miles. Couples in their eighties, for
example, average about one trip per day for a total of about 3
miles of travel (Zimmerman, 19811. Such figures, as indicated
above, do not necessarily indicate relative deprivation in mobil-
ity among the aged and may reveal more about changes in
activity patterns than about mobility and aging.
At every stage in the life cycle, household travel patterns are
correlated with a few key variables. Travel is always statisti-
cally associated with the number of automobiles owned by a
household and in turn, this variable is most often highly depend-
ent on household size and income. In statistical terms, then, we
often find that households consisting of elderly people travel
less than households consisting of younger people in large part
because they are smaller households and they have fewer work-
ers, fewer automobiles, and less disposable income. It is hard to
prove that aging directly affects one's propensity to travel but
easier to identify with elderly households certain economic and
demographic characteristics that are associated with reduced
travel.
One-third of all trips and about 40 percent of all vehicle mile-
age are associated with earning a living the trips made to and
from work and the trips made while on the job. Because old
people are less likely to be working, these trips are eliminated
from their travel patterns. Similarly, social and recreational
travel exhibits a marked decline with age. Married couples in
their seventies make fewer than half as many social and recre-
ational trips as married couples in their thirties. The one com-
ponent of travel that seems invariant with age is "family busi
OCR for page 172
172
MARTIN WACHS
ness," which includes trips for shopping, medical care, and
banking. The NPTS showed, for example, that single people in
their seventies who lived alone made about the same number of
trips for these purposes as single people in their twenties who
lived alone (Zimmerman, 19811. These data may illustrate that
declines in aggregate travel by elderly people are mostly associ-
ated with retirement from work and changes in social and rec-
reational preferences. The trips that the elderly consider to be
most essential seem to continue to be made. Mobility may well
be a severe problem for many elderly people, but the dimensions
of the problem cannot be grasped fully by the aggregate analysis
of travel patterns alone.
COMMON STEREOTYPES OF THE ELDERLY AND
THEIR MOBILITY NEEDS
The mobility problems of the elderly are complex and in some
cases severe, but the conventional wisdom regarding such prob-
lems is dominated by stereotypes that are for the most part
untrue. The elderly are frequently portrayed as "transit depend-
ent," people who have "given up" their cars as they reach retire-
ment age, in part because of declining vision and reflexes and
increasing fears about the dangers of driving. The reality is that
most Americans of all ages make the vast majority of their trips
in automobiles. In the aggregate, we make 84 percent of our
trips in cars; we make 9 percent of our trips walking and use
public transit for only about 3 percent of our trips (Klinger et
al., 19821. The elderly do not appear to be substantially less
reliant on automobiles than are younger people. In my own
research on travel patterns in Los Angeles, for example, ~ found
that 89 percent of all vehicle trips made by people over the age
of 65 were made in automobiles, although the elderly were more
likely than younger groups to be passengers and somewhat less
likely to be drivers. Only 7 percent of the trips by older people
in Los Angeles were made on public transit. Although this is
still twice the proportion that characterizes younger groups, it
is still a small percentage of all the trips made by the elderly
(Wachs, 1979, p. 501.
The physical changes that accompany aging do eventually rob
people of the ability to drive an automobile safely and comfort-
ably, but these changes occur gradually over many years. The
OCR for page 173
TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
173
vast majority of drivers are able to continue operating cars well
into their seventies, and many keep driving into their eighties.
There are few physiological or medical reasons to associate tran-
sit dependency with retirement status, but many public policy-
makers often make this association. Perhaps because elderly
people do not travel for work-related purposes and this type of
travel is for most Americans the most common type, reductions
in the volume of travel during the early years of retirement are
mistaken for reductions in the ability to travel, especially by
automobile.
The stereotype of a transit-dependent elderly population may
also in large part be drawn from the fact that more than 90
percent of all people in their thirties, forties, and fifties are
licensed to drive and less than half of the population over the
age of 70 is so licensed. ~ believe, however, that we are misinter-
preting this difference if we attribute it to the process of aging.
Many of today's elderly people never learned to drive, having
grown up before automobile driving was as universal as it is
today. The fact that this pattern is culturally determined and
not an inherent function of the aging process is illustrated by
the difference between the rates of elderly men and elderly
women who are licensed to drive. Only 33 percent of women over
the age of 70 are licensed to drive, but nearly 70 percent of men
in this age group are presently licensed to drive (Asin, 19801. In
the early years of the automobile, it was far less common for
women to learn to drive, and most of the elderly women who do
not drive have never done so. Because women outnumber men
quite substantially in the older age groups, women who never
drove dominate the nondriving component of the elderly. By
comparison, among people in their thirties, forties, and fifties,
there are almost no differences in the proportions of men and
women who possess driver's licenses (Asin, 19801. More than 90
percent of men and women in these age groups have licenses.
Thus, we would conclude that as the present elderly are replaced
by the next generation, a much larger percentage of the total
elderly population will consist of people having driver's licenses
and that the biggest difference will be among women.
Looking at vehicle ownership as another indicator of relative
mobility, a pattern similar to that for driver's licenses may be
seen. Although the elderly appear to be relatively less mobile
than younger people, as a group, they are hardly transit depend
OCR for page 174
174
MARTIN WACHS
ent. About two-thirds of American households headed by people
over the age of 65 own at least one automobile, and about one-
third own no automobiles (Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Associ-
ation, 1984, p. 43~. The rate of carlessness is more than twice as
high for those over the age of 65 as it is for those in their fifties,
but it is difficult to classify a group as transit dependent when
two-thirds of its members own vehicles. In addition, T believe
that many of these households (the one-third who own no cars)
never owned autos and that they will be replaced in the coming
decades by older people who enter the retirement years possess-
ing automobiles.
Because many of today's elderly live in denser central-city
neighborhoods and do not drive, and a greater proportion of the
younger population lives in the suburbs and does drive, it is
often said that elderly people give up their suburban communi-
ties and relocate to central-city areas after retirement when the
decline in their mobility forces them to live closer to essential
services. This may be true for some older people, but as a gen-
eralization, the picture is more in error than it is accurate. A
simple examination of census data indicates that differences
with age between suburban low-density living and inner-city
high-density living have little to do with the process of aging.
Rather, the observed pattern is explained more accurately by
major economic and cultural differences among population co-
horts. Census data on tenure of residence show that most of
today's transit-dependent inner-city elderly have lived at their
present addresses for decades. They are largely people who grew
older at their central-city locations, and they include many who
never drove and never lived in the suburbs. The suburbs are
largely inhabited by different cohorts of people, many of whom
are beginning to reach retirement age and most of whom have
been driving for decades. Rather than concluding that these
people will become less mobile and move to inner-city neighbor-
hoods served by transit, it appears more likely that they will
continue to live at low densities and continue to drive through-
out their sixties and seventies and into their eighties.
~ believe that the population will continue to suburbanize dur-
ing the coming decades, resulting in more and more elderly
suburbanites. This process will occur, despite frequent predic-
tions of the revival of the inner city, because of the basic eco-
nomic relationship between housing and mobility. During the
OCR for page 175
TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
175
past 20 years, "typical" American family budgets for low-, mid-
dle-, and upper-income households have devoted more than 20
percent of total expenditures to housing and about 6 to ~ percent
of total expenditures to transportation. During the same years,
trends in the consumer price index reveal that the price of hous-
ing has multiplied by a factor of four while transportation prices
have roughly doubled. Despite the well-known effects of the en-
ergy crises on the prices of gasoline, then, the reality is that
housing is both a larger item of household expenditure than is
travel, and it is becoming relatively more expensive over time.
Because the cost of housing generally declines as distance in-
creases from the center of the city, it remains economically ra-
tional for most American households to trade increases in the
cost of transportation for decreases in the unit cost of housing
by moving farther from downtown in order to get more housing
for their housing budget. As developers recognize this trend,
they put up smaller and denser housing units in the suburbs,
and each year the population continues to move farther from the
city centers.
By focusing attention on the stereotype of the elderly as a
relatively carless, nondriving, transit-dependent group in a rel-
atively car-owning and -driving world, we often fail to take note
of the fact that old people are an incredibly diverse group with
life-styles and behavior patterns that are as varied as those of
any age group. By focusing on the richness of this diversity
instead of the simplistic stereotype, we may arrive at a com-
pletely different understanding of the mobility patterns and
needs of old people. Let me illustrate this by focusing on the
mobility patterns of the elderly in the inner city versus the
elderly of the suburbs.
MOBILITY PROBLEMS OF THE
INNER-CITY ELDERLY
The elderly of our inner cities include many people who are
transit dependent and accustomed to the high density of activi-
ties and neighborhood services that characterized urban neigh-
borhoods of the early decades of this century. Many of these
people grew older with their communities and never experienced
the total automobile orientation that characterizes later gener-
ations more accustomed to suburban low-density living. Many
OCR for page 176
176
MARTIN WACHS
of the inner-city elderly are widows whose husbands did drive.
These women experienced a severe blow to their mobility when
their husbands died, separating them from their access to auto-
mobiles as well as from their lifetime partners. Also included
among the inner-city population are most of our ethnic minority
elderly, including those who grew older with their communities
and some who arrived rather late in life as part of multigenera-
tional households that migrated to the barrios and ghettos of
larger cities.
Many of the urban elderly are mobility dependent. Having
never driven, and being economically limited to using taxis only
for rare emergency trips, these people must rely on the public
transit system and on relatives or friends who drive. By depend-
ing to some extent on others to drive them, elderly people in this
situation suffer substantial reductions in their freedom of choice.
Spontaneity is an important ingredient of mobility, consisting,
as it does, of the ability to decide at a moment's notice that a
trip to a doctor, park, or theater would be appropriate. Depend-
ing on a child or a friend to provide transportation to such
activities usually means accommodating to their availability
and perhaps deferring a trip when a lift is not available. This
dependency becomes part of the psychological sense of depend-
ency widely associated with aging. It explains why, in a number
of attitudinal studies, elderly respondents have reported that
accepting rides from others was more convenient and less phys-
ically demanding than using public transit, but it also made the
respondents feel that it put them under an obligation that they
would not repay, or saddled them with feelings of indebtedness
(Carp, 1972a, 1972b).
Although public transit may allow for greater spontaneity than
dependence on friends or relatives who drive, it is fraught with
additional problems for many old people. First, and most obvi-
ously, a person who uses public transportation is limited to
choosing destinations that are served by such transit and to
traveling at hours of the day when service is conveniently avail-
able. These constraints do limit one's choices, as ~ found in a
study that T did a number of years ago. When T calculated, for
example, how many hospitals and clinics a person could reach
from the center of a low-income, inner-city community by bus
versus by automobile, relying on published bus schedules and
actual driving times at the noon hour on a typical weekday, ~
OCR for page 177
TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
177
found that a person could reach 40 hospitals and clinics within
15 minutes of driving time but only 2 within a similar travel
period using public transit. If the acceptable access time was
lengthened to 30 minutes, the citizen of this neighborhood could
reach 143 hospital's and clinics with a car but only 14 by transit
service. The point is not that an individual needs to use a large
number of facilities in the course of his or her daily activities
but rather that the automobile provides much greater freedom
of choice than transit. The transit-dependent elderly person must
either choose from a smaller number of available hospitals (or
parks, theaters, and educational facilities) or invest a much
larger amount of time in traveling than automobile users spend
on such efforts (Wachs and Kumagai, 19731.
A second problem with public transit is that it may involve
substantial physical barriers that are difficult or impossible for
some elderly people to surmount. Because buses and rail sys-
tems operate on fixed routes that generally are not designed
around the travel patterns of particular citizens, many elderly
people must walk Tong distances, exposed to cold, heat, or rain,
involving hills, stairs, and broad, busy streets to cross. The vast
majority of people who are classified as elderly by virtue of
being age 65 or older can easily negotiate the urban landscape,
but we have a special interest in those who cannot. As life
expectancy lengthens and more and more inner-city elderly peo-
ple are in their eighties, the physical barriers involved in transit
travel become extremely significant factors. A national survey
conducted for the U.S. Department of Transportation's Urban
Mass Transportation Administration (1978) found that 7.4 mil-
lion persons living in the urban areas of the United States were
physically 'limited in their ability to use public transportation.
Although this number included many people who were young,
some 47 percent were over the age of 65, and 67 percent were
over the age of 55. About one-fifth of these people were physi-
cally unable to use public transit at all; an additional 30 percent
did use transit but only with considerable physical difficulty or
discomfort.
Elderly people who depend on public transit face another bar-
rier to mobility that is perhaps the most distressing of all and
that has only recently been studied. It appears that transit pa-
trons are frequently victimized by criminals who prey on people
walking to and from bus and train stops, waiting at transit
OCR for page 178
178
MARTIN WACHS
stops, and riding on transit vehicles. Many elderly people report
that they are fearful of using public transit, especially after
dark, and their fears appear to be well founded. ~ recently con-
ducted a survey of more than a thousand households in a central
portion of Los Angeles that is well served by transit and densely
populated by people of a variety of income levels and ethnic
groups (Levine and Wachs, 19851. The area, like many inner-city
communities, contains a large number of households headed by
elderly people. The results of the survey were astounding. Add-
ing up the crimes respondents reported had occurred walking to
and from bus stops, waiting at bus stops, and riding on buses,
my coworkers and ~ discovered that incidence rates among our
sample were 30 times the crime victimization rates reported by
the local transit police. The gap between the reported crime
rates and the responses to our survey were attributable to poor
reporting of crimes by the victims and by the police failing to
categorize crimes as being related to transit travel. The findings
showed that 17 percent of those who used the bus regularly had
been victims of a crime during the previous 3 years. Among the
respondents to the survey who were over the age of 65, 20 per-
cent had been victimized in that time period; among the respon-
dents under the age of 30, only ~ percent had been so victimized.
It is clear that the elderly are victims of crime while traveling
on public transit to a far greater extent than other groups. Their
greater vulnerability occurs in part because the elderly make
up a disproportionate share of transit users, being relatively
transit dependent, but it also happens because the elderly are
singled out as easier targets by criminals. Most of the crimes
committed against all age groups were purse snatchings and
pickpocketings; as a rule, they did not involve injuries, but sub-
stantial numbers of victims reported being pushed, shoved,
punched, and threatened with weapons.
To sum up, the inner-city elderly, who include a relatively
small proportion of car owners and drivers, have a mobility
problem related to their dependency on public transit or on
others to drive them. This dependency reduces their mobility
because it reduces individual control over decision making and
spontaneity in travel. Depending on public transit means accept-
ing a limited selection of possible destinations, negotiating phys-
ical barriers that for some may be substantial, and exposing
oneself to the risks of victimization by criminals.
OCR for page 179
TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
MOBILITY PROBLEMS OF THE
SUBURBAN ELDERLY
179
The majority of people reaching retirement age today are not
the inner-city, transit-dependent elderly. They are suburban, and
most typify what Bernice Neugarten describes as the "young
old." They are classified as elderly by their chronological age
but are active and healthy, the kind of people likely to take
advantage of senior citizen discounts at theaters and sporting
events. They are, for the most part, mobile because most of them
both own and drive automobiles. Each year, there are more and
more of these active, mobile elderly, including larger and larger
numbers of people who adopted Tow-density, suburban life-styles
decades ago and who continue to live in the suburbs well into
their retirement years. Most have no difficulty thriving in envi-
ronments that lack public transportation and in which the doc-
tor and supermarket may be located many miles from their
residences. My studies of the elderly of Los Angeles County
indicated that about half of the elderly there are already to be
found in such environments, that they are roughly twice as
likely to have driver's licenses than the central-city elderly, and
that they make two to three times as many vehicle trips per
household per day as the inner-city elderly (Wachs, 1979, chap-
ters 3 and 51. In rough terms, by the turn of the next century,
the number of suburban low-density, auto-oriented elderly will
more than double, and the number of transit-dependent inner-
city elderly will decrease in absolute numbers and decrease even
more dramatically as a proportion of the total elderly population.
The mobility problems of this group will arise later in life, as
increasing numbers of them survive into their late seventies,
eighties, and nineties. When failing vision and increasing frailty
ultimately make it impossible for them to drive, these people
can become in relative terms, and rather suddenly, more isolated
and dependent on others than the inner-city elderly who may
never have driven cars. Because their life-styTes were more de-
pendent on their ability to drive and, consequently, they chose
to reside in environments having lower densities of services in
close proximity to residences, a greater void is left in their lives
when they can no longer drive. Because of these Tow densities,
medical care and shopping is even harder to reach than it is in
the inner city, and for the same reason it is far more costly for
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MARTIN WACHS
public agencies to operate transit in such areas. Many who are
deprived relatively late in life of their mobility are forced to
relocate, move in with their children or other relatives, or move
into congregate living facilities. The trauma of such moves is
accentuated because they come relatively late in life and be-
cause they are forced on an individual by a lack of mobility
rather than being the result of preference. The fact that this
population enjoys mobility the longest of any of the elderly does
not make the ultimate adjustment to its Toss easier, and it is
interesting to note that each year a larger and larger number of
us will face just such an adjustment.
NATIONAL POLICY ON THE MOBILITY
NEEDS OF THE ELDERLY
For 20 or more years, meeting the mobility needs of the elderly
has been an explicit element of national transportation policy.
Yet despite this commitment, there is no clear consensus on the
most efficient ways to use public resources to accomplish our
goals. There is also widespread disappointment that the hun-
dreds of millions of dollars that have already been spent have
resulted in little tangible progress. The subject has become
highly politicized, and it is difficult to take a position on the
issue without appearing to "take sides."
In 1968 Congress adopted the Architectural Barriers Act,
which was intended to ensure reasonable access to public build-
ings by physically handicapped people. Passage of the law was
the first result of a series of political actions that included nu-
merous lawsuits, legislation, and regulations affecting the tran-
sit industry. In San Francisco, for example, a bitter fight took
place over the question of wheelchair access to BART stations
and cars, and in 1970 Congress amended the basic Urban Mass
Transportation Act of 1964 to declare that "it is national policy
that elderly and handicapped persons have the same right as
other persons to utilize mass transportation facilities and serv-
ices; that special efforts have to be made in the planning and
design of mass transportation facilities and services so that the
availability to elderly and handicpped persons of mass transpor-
tation which they can effectively utilize will be assured."2 Yet
the broad national policy stated here did not specify how agen-
cies and transportation authorities were to meet the needs of
OCR for page 181
TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
181
the elderly, and that omission has been the source of a bitter
debate that remains unresolved despite numerous revisions of
federal regulations and thousands of hearings, court cases, and
scholarly analyses.
One source of difficulty has been the lumping together of "el-
derly and handicapped" in this policy statement, as though these
citizens by definition had identical mobility needs. The majority
of the elderly are not handicapped, and the majority of the
handicapped are not elderly. Labeling the two as one group has
several negative effects. First, it stigmatizes the elderly who
deserve and demand to be considered a group with unique char-
acteristics and who vigorously assert that aging is not a handi-
cap but a normal part of living. The label also focuses the atten-
tion of transportation planners and managers on the physical
requirements of the handicapped and associates the removal of
physical barriers to travel with the attainment of all of the
mobility needs of the elderly. Efforts to remove physical barriers
to travel certainly deserve applause, but proper consideration of
the needs of the elderly can hardly be limited to the removal of
physical barriers. Nevertheless, although lumping together the
"elderly and handicapped" has harmful effects, it must also be
observed that it has probably resulted in more attention for the
transportation needs of older people than would otherwise be
the case. It is much easier to capture policymakers' attention
when speaking for disabled veterans, the blind, and the deaf
instead of competing with these groups for attention.
The tension over labeling the elderly as synonymous with the
handicapped is part of the background for what we might call
"the great debate" in the field of mobility for these groups. This
debate, which has been raging for decades and is far from reso-
Jution, is between the proponents of "mainstreaming" or total
accessibility on the one hand and those advocating the provision
of separate specialized services for the elderly on the other. The
proponents of total accessibility or mainstreaming argue that
the law requires all transit facilities and equipment to be totally
accessible to the elderly and handicapped and that emphasis
should be placed on the removal of all architectural barriers and
the equipping of all buses with wheelchair lifts. Others argue
that changing the entire public transit infrastructure to accom-
modate wheelchairs will cost billions and that it will provide
inferior service for the elderly and handicapped in comparison
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MARTIN WACHS
to separate door-to-door services, which are available exclusively
to these groups (Fielding, 19821. The cost of mainstreaming has
been vigorously debated, but it is certainly high. Transit agen-
cies have purchased wheelchair lifts for thousands of buses at
an extra cost per vehicle that is reported to be in the range of
$12,000 and that involves annual maintenance costs ranging
from $500 to $4,000. The lifts reduce the seating capacity of
buses, and their use slows travel for all passengers on the vehicle.
Furthermore, the use of these buses by the handicapped has
been low. One transit company, for example, which has about
120 lift-equipped buses, reported that the lifts are actually de-
ployed to serve one to four handicapped riders per day through-
out its entire system; the nation's largest all-bus transit system
in Los Angeles carries 51 daily wheelchair users although ap-
proximately 1,900 of its total fleet of 2,600 buses are equipped
with wheelchair lifts (Southern California Rapid Transit Dis-
trict, 1984, p. 241. The lifts have been unreliable, and handi-
capped riders have been embarrassed by the delays they cause
other passengers when wheelchair lifts are operated. In addi-
tion, surveys of the handicapped have shown that wheelchair
occupants usually find it difficult to get from their homes to bus
stops, certainly hindering their use of fixed-route "mainstream"
service in comparison with separate fleets providing door-to-door
service (Wachs, 19791. The Congressional Budget Office (1979)
estimated that it would take 30 years and over $7 billion to
achieve full wheelchair access to the nation's transit systems.
The American Public Transit Association reported that the av-
erage capital and operating cost per trip by handicapped people
among five transit agencies was over $700, primarily because of
the low rates at which the facilities were actually utilized.
For nearly 20 years, a variety of draft regulations, adopted
regulations, lawsuits, amendments to legislation, and public de-
bates have come in rapid succession. They demonstrate the clear
differences between the transit industry's perspective, which
emphasizes the cost-effectiveness of separate door-to-door sys-
tems, and the activist's perspective, which emphasizes main-
streaming and full accessibility as a basic human right (Rosen-
bloom, 19821.
In 1983 proposals to amend the requirements for providing
service to the elderly and handicapped were again made, al-
though they still await adoption because of continuing contro
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TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
183
versy. The proposed regulations would require transit operators
to provide separate paratransit services for the elderly and
handicapped or to offer a combination of wheelchair lifts and
paratransit. Whichever option were to be chosen by the operator,
the transit agency would not be required to spend more than 7.1
percent of its federal financial assistance, nor more than 3 per-
cent of the agency's annual operating budget, on expenditures
to meet the needs of the elderly and handicapped. These limits
would constitute an uneasy compromise between activist and
management perspectives. Because of the heated political cTi-
mate in which decision making on this issue has taken place, it
has taken more than 20 years of debate, legislation, and litiga-
tion, and billions in public spending, to arrive at this accommo-
dation. In the end, however, the compromise would appear to
ensure rather little in the way of mobility to the elderly.
A second element of transportation policy for the elderly and
the handicapped has been the requirement that these groups be
offered lower fares than the general public on existing public
transit systems. Under current regulations, to be eligible for
federal transit operating assistance under Section 5 of the Ur-
ban Mass Transportation Act (as amended), the operator must
provide elderly riders with fare reductions (they must not pay
more than half the regular fares during nonpeak hours). In fact,
many transit companies charge lower fares than required by the
regulation, and many extend the fare reduction to the rush hour
as well as to nonrush-hour periods. The emphasis on fare reduc-
tions, like the removal of physical barriers, is of great impor-
tance to a segment of the elderly in this case, the elderly whose
use of transit is limited by small disposable income. Yet reduced
fares do little to improve transportation service for those who
receive infrequent, sparse, or nonexistent transit service. Tn-
deed, the requirement that they receive Tower fares for serving
elderly passengers might even discourage transit companies in
some cases from making special efforts to improve those services
that are tailored to meeting the needs of the elderly. Public
transit service in the United States covers less than half of its
operating costs from the fares its passengers pay, the majority
of the costs being borne by subsidies. If a transit company must
charge its elderly riders only half the normal fare and receives
no special subsidy for carrying a larger number of elderly pas-
sengers, it faces the prospect of increasing deficits if it spends
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MARTIN WACHS
money for improvements that will bring additional elderly ri-
ders. Although reduced fares for the elderly seem a benefit, they
actually result in larger economic Tosses as more passengers are
served, and they clearly discourage transit managers from being
creative in trying to serve larger markets of elderly patrons.
Another area in which a national commitment has been made
to the provision of transportation services for the elderly is the
financial support of specialized paratransit services operated by
social services agencies, volunteer organizations, and municipal-
ities across the nation. Using funds available through the Older
Americans Act, the Social Security Act, the Housing and Com-
munity Development Act, and hundreds of state and local sta-
tutes, senior citizen centers, health care facilities, veterans pro-
grams, and many other groups operate their own door-to-door
transportation services. A variety of researchers have shown
that we are spending perhaps a billion dollars per year on such
services, most employing vans and drivers in fleets of a few
vehicles. Studies have consistently shown that there is a great
deal of duplication and inefficiency in what has come to be
called the "social services" transportation sector. The small scale
of operations, low patronage rates, inexperienced staff, and re-
luctance to rely on larger public agencies for transportation
services have made it difficult to overcome the high costs of such
services by forcing "coordination" as a condition for receiving
subsidies. A number of studies have shown that efforts to force
mergers or consolidations of specialized transit operations have
been met with institutional resistance, and, ultimately, the costs
of consolidation and cooperation have been so high that they
tend to eliminate all of the benefits anticipated from these poli-
cies. In the social services sector, the cost of providing a ride to
a senior center or health care facility is often on the order of $20
or more; in newer, smaller, and inexperienced systems, it is often
closer to $100. Yet the rides are often provided free or for a token
fare of 50 cents or a dollar.
The reality, then, is that most Americans over the age of 65
provide their own transportation through private automobiles.
For most, such provision is not a problem, and it is consistent
with their life-styTes prior to old age. For those who are unable
to drive, however, the choices remain limited, and there is little
prospect for dramatic improvement. Some can rely on traditional
fixed-route public transit, but they are then limited in their
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TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
185
travels to visiting those destinations that are served by transit.
Reduced fares and the removal of architectural barriers are in-
creasing the proportion of the elderIv Copulation that is able to
use public transit, but the increase is small in relation to the
cost. Tn addition, those who rely on public transit to fulfill their
travel requirements run a high risk of becoming the victims of
crimes. Social services agencies frequently provide specialized
door-to-door transportation services for their clients, and these
services do overcome the physical barriers and safety problem of
many public transit users. Yet the costs are enormous, and when
the services are considered in combination, it is clear that they
are least able to meet the needs of the growing number of iso-
lated elderly people in suburbia the former drivers who live in
Tow-density areas reached by few public transit routes and few
social services transportation agencies.
RESEARCH DIRECTIONS IN HOUSING/
MOBILITY TRADE-OFFS
An active and satisfying old age requires the opportunity to
engage in a variety of activities at reasonable costs in terms of
effort, time, and money. Older people are diverse in their life
styles, needs, and preferences, and it is therefore difficult to
prescribe an appropriate type and level of mobility. We must be
equally understanding of and attentive to the needs for social
integration of active and mobile recent retirees and of house-
bound disabled people, even though the two groups may have
very different needs. Funding arrangements and legal require-
ments must be more flexible than they have been to date. The
diversity of mobility needs among the elderly indicate that by
prescribing narrowly defined programs we are limiting the op-
portunities of those whose needs are not addressed under those
programs.
In general, elderly people meet most of their travel needs by
private means: walking, driving, and being driven by friends
and relatives. Because each year an increasing proportion of
elderly people own and operate automobiles, cars are likely to
remain the major source of mobility in coming decades. As a
result, more research is needed on the aging driver to provide a
better understanding of the physiological, sensory, and attitudi-
nal aspects of driving in old age. We could, perhaps, do a better
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MARTIN WACHS
job of designing automobiles, highways, and traffic control sys-
tems to reflect the fact that the proportion of drivers who are
old is increasing more rapidly than the proportion of the popu-
lation that is old. Motor vehicle accidents are the leading cause
of accidental deaths for people over the age of 65, as they are for
younger people, and they account for half the accidental deaths
among people over the age of 75. Older people are physically
vulnerable and are more likely than younger people to be killed
when involved in a car crash. Although people over 65 account
for 7 percent of those involved in accidents, they account for 12
percent of those killed. And in fatal accidents in which one
driver is over the age of 65, it is reported that the older driver
is 3.5 times more likely than the younger driver to be killed
(KoTtnow, 1985, p. 211. Automobile manufacturers, for example,
do surprisingly little research on product design for elderly driv-
ers, offer few options specifically tailored to old people, and
devote a surprisingly small proportion of their budgets to mar-
ket research targeted to an older market.
In a society in which the automobile is nearly universal, we
know relatively little of the psychological and behavioral effects
of the declining ability to drive in advanced old age or the effects
of declining driving skills on housing and locational decisions.
These are both fruitful areas for research in the coming years.
The Transportation Research Board is planning a 2-year study
to review research on and experience with older drivers and
pedestrians and to recommend actions that should be taken on
the basis of future population characteristics. This research could
be an extremely important undertaking.
Traditional public transit, which usually involves fixed-route,
scheduled bus and rail service, meets another share of the mo-
bility needs of the elderly, especially in the inner cities. Efforts
are proceeding slowly but surely to remove architectural barri-
ers to public transit, but for many, these services are difficult to
get to, frightening to use, and limiting to the extent that they
cannot serve every destination. To date, research has focused on
the physical mobility of the elderly to use transit vehicles; much
more is to be learned regarding the elderly user's attitudes to-
ward transit service improvements. T believe, for example, that
a well-founded fear of crime is one of the greatest barriers to
transit use by older people and that greater attention to security
might be one of the most important directions for public policy
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TRANSPORTATION'S ROLE IN SOCIAL INTEGRATION
187
makers attempting to better tailor transportation for the el-
derly. More market research is needed on the social and psycho-
logical barriers as well as the physical barriers to the use of
conventional public transit by older people.
Although they provide fewer trips for elderly people than autos
or transit vehicles, specialized paratransit services provide crit-
ical door-to-door services for those having more severe mobility
limitations. To date, however, these services have been limited
in their geographic coverage and limited to certain types of trips
and clients and to those making advanced reservations. In ad-
dition, in many cases, such services have been duplicative, ex-
pensive, and inefficient. Efforts to coordinate and consolidate
services of this type have had limited success. The most promis-
ing area for improvement is in what economists call "user-side"
or "demand-side" subsidies. Under these subsidy plans, clients
are provided, at low or moderate cost, with vouchers or coupons
they can use to purchase taxi rides, bus rides, or specialized
escorted van rides within a fairly large jurisdiction and without
limits as to trip purpose. The service operators are reimbursed
for the services actually provided. Although a subsidy is in-
volved and there is some potential for fraud, this type of mecha-
nism has a potential for flexibility and efficiency that is matched
by few current social service agency transportation services.
To some extent, retirement communities and congregate living
facilities provide collective transportation services for their re-
sidents that take the place of private automobiles and substitute
for door-to-door paratransit services. Transportation provided in
this manner becomes part of the infrastructure of housing serv-
ices. In some instances, regular shuttle services are provided to
nearby transit stations or shopping centers; in other cases, reg-
ularly scheduled recreational outings are provided; and at least
one large San Francisco housing development has compact autos
available for rent to its residents at short notice on an hourly or
daily basis. We know relatively little about the economics of
such transportation services or about the size of the community
at which it becomes economically feasible to incorporate trans-
portation services with housing. Case study research and sys-
tematic comparisons of such services with traditional transit
options would reveal a great deal about the potentials and the
limits of integrating mobility into the residential environment.
Today, for those who are most severely limited in mobility, we
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MARTIN WACHS
try to bring the services to the client instead of providing the
client with mobility. Meals-on-wheels, home health care, and
friendly visitor services all take the place of trips for those
having the least mobility and the greatest need. These services
are, of course, quite costly to provide, but they are critical to a
small but important segment of the elderly. From my observa-
tion, what such programs often need most is a stable funding
base. So many in-home services are of such small scale and short
duration that the bulk of staff time is devoted to proposal writ-
ing and fundraising rather than the delivery of services.
Housing and mobility are clearly interdependent elements of
our social environment. If one chooses a Tow-density suburban
living environment, far from friends, relatives, and services, it
may entail high mobility costs for the individual and society,
especially in old age. High-density inner-city environments may
impose high housing costs and less aesthetically pleasing envi-
ronments on their residents, but it may cost individuals and
society much less to provide access to services at such locations.
Although we recognize these principles, we know less than we
would like to know about the economic, social, and cultural
trade-offs between housing and mobility. Therefore, any investi-
gation of the interrelationships between housing and mobility
in old age must include attitudinal and social dimensions as
well as physical and economic ones.
NOTES
1. Public Law, 90-480, "Public Buildings: Accessibility to the Handicapped" (1968),
82 Stat. 718.
2. Public Law 91-453, "Urban Mass Transportation Act" (1970), 84 Stat. 962.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
elderly people
