AccessCity for London

I ve been waiting for AccessCity’s new website. Dominic Campbell reassured me that it will be worth the wait and now its been launched for a few days!

While some organisations have previously created some interesting views on accessibility in London, including Transport for London’s admirable efforts through their own route planner, this information is often created from an ‘expert’ perspective with little input from Londoners, the people who live in and travel around the city all day every day.

Its our hope that these organisations will also benefit from a users perspective of London, getting a rich and diverse view of the challenges people face getting around London and help these organisations to target improvements in line with the wants and needs of Londoners.

It is always best to involve users and get their perspectives. I like this from the inclusive design perspective, everybody has challenges when it comes to negotiating London, young, old, disabled, able bodied, men, women, people with children, drivers, taxi drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, and passengers of public transport. Most of my friends navigate London using the tube and they orientate places using directions from the nearest tube station/underground. For wheelchair users like myself, it was a no go area. My cognitive sense of directions in London are dictated mostly by (accessible) bus routes. And now there is a guide to level access underground stations but still they do not indicate that there are still about 4 to 8 cms step up from the platform. And on the buses we have this tug of space with people with buggies who do not always make space for you.

But what I notice is that older people have difficulties when they do not always get seats and slow walkers have problems accessing buses. I do not want to go on but every capital city have congestion problems and challenges. I am conscious that I have a daughter who cycles everywhere in London and I fear for her. I know taxi drivers who frequently complain to me about all sorts and yet, they are the people who knows the in and outs of the roads in London.

Certainly I look forward to having a space where users in London can exchange their stories as well as suggest solutions. A forum where they can advice each other must be good. I certainly hope that at some point, the responses will be gathered to prepare for a better transport system especially in preparation for those visitors in 2012. I also hope that strategy will be planned for those unexpected contingencies. London almost stopped when we just had some snow.

As in the case of engaging users, I would like to see how they get enough responses and the variety and diversity of users? I shall be very interested in seeing how AccessCity are going to get the interaction going. I assume this will necessarily only involve those who engages in forums like these.

I wish them all the luck and will be interested to see some outcomes and applaud the idea.