Use of Rear-Facing Position for Common Wheelchairs on Transit Buses (2003)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

FOREWORD By Staff Transportation Research Board PREFACE Transit administrators, engineers, and researchers often face problems for which in- formation already exists, either in documented form or as undocumented experience and practice. This information may be fragmented, scattered, and unevaluated. As a conse- quence, full knowledge of what has been learned about a problem may not be brought to bear on its solution. Costly research findings may go unused, valuable experience may be overlooked, and due consideration may not be given to recommended practices for solv- ing or alleviating the problem. There is information on nearly every subject of concern to the transit industry. Much of it derives from research or from the work of practitioners faced with problems in their day-to-day work. To provide a systematic means for assembling and evaluating such use- ful information and to make it available to the entire transit community, the Transit Co- operative Research Program Oversight and Project Selection (TOPS) Committee author- ized the Transportation Research Board to undertake a continuing study. This study, TCRP Project J-7, “Synthesis of Information Related to Transit Problems,” searches out and synthesizes useful knowledge from all available sources and prepares concise, documented reports on specific topics. Reports from this endeavor constitute a TCRP re- port series, Synthesis of Transit Practice. The synthesis series reports on current knowledge and practice, in a compact format, without the detailed directions usually found in handbooks or design manuals. Each re- port in the series provides a compendium of the best knowledge available on those meas- ures found to be the most successful in resolving specific problems. This synthesis will be of interest to transit agency staff and those who work with them in dealing with common wheelchair securement on transit buses. It offers information on existing programs in many countries and documents transit agency experiences for the benefit of others considering similar deployments, in particular with respect to the Americans with Disability Act (ADA) and to its use in U.S. Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems. The report describes the state of the practice with respect to the use of rear- facing position for accommodating “common wheelchairs” (as defined by the ADA) on large transit buses (more than 30,000 lb) and identifies pertinent issues related to its transferability to the U.S. context. This report from the Transportation Research Board integrates the information ob- tained from a literature review, gathered from many sources and countries. Agency sur- veys of all Canadian transit systems that have adopted the rear-facing position, case stud- ies, and interviews with key experts in several other countries (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden, as well as communications with Australian experts) were conducted to obtain information and to offer better insights. Case studies were conducted at British Columbia Rapid Transit (BC Transit), Victoria, BC, Canada, and Mississauga Transit, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Additionally, extensive discussions were held with Alameda–Contra Costa Transit (AC Transit) staff, Oakland, California—the first U.S. transit agency to design a rear-facing position in their 2002 order of transit buses to be used in a planned BRT deployment. A panel of experts in the subject area guided the work of organizing and evaluating the collected data and reviewed the final synthesis report. A consultant was engaged to collect and synthesize the information and to write the report. Both the consultant and the members of the oversight panel are acknowledged on the title page. This synthesis is an

immediately useful document that records the practices that were acceptable within the limitations of the knowledge available at the time of its preparation. As progress in re- search and practice continues, new knowledge will be added to that now at hand.