Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis students Gianfranco Gliozzo, Gareth Simons, Katerina Skroumpelou, Stelios Tsaparas explain their findings on a study of London Oyster card data and disability.
What is a city without its people? And what is the city to its people if it isn’t accessible to them? Furthermore, what are the implications if a city is accessible only for limited groups of its inhabitants?
The issue of accessibility becomes increasingly important as cities grow, transportation infrastructure gets optimised and the call for equality becomes more prevalent. As the disability rights movement argues, people with disabilities must enjoy ‘equal access to social, political, and economic life’, and more specifically, ‘accessibility and safety in transportation, architecture, and the physical environment’.
Looking at and experiencing London, we can see, seemingly everywhere, a significant attempt to make the city more accessible to all. So, we wanted to explore to what extent these facilities are used. It is an attempt, in a sense, to derive how effective the efforts towards improving accessibility have been. We recognise that London is developing mechanisms and techniques to get everyone involved in its daily activities, to help it breathe and grow. How successful is London in getting everyone involved in its frenetic pace?
A report published by TfL in February 2014, ‘Your accessible transport network’ says ‘London has one of the most accessible transport networks in the world. [It has] accessible bus and taxi fleets, the step-free Docklands Light Railway and more Tube and London Overground stations are being made step-free.’
We wanted to see to what extent these changes are becoming apparent, so we asked TfL for London Oyster card data, and started to visualise them. It’s important to note here that our emphasis is on visualization, and our findings are explorative rather than conclusive.
As a first step, we explored the distribution across space of London residents with disabilities relative to the position of London Underground stations. The goal was to see how the resident populations may vary throughout the day based on the number of freedom pass tube trips that are made. The visualization showed that the population in the central areas changes considerably throughout the day.
The next step was to find patterns when comparing disabled freedom pass holder trips with other trips. In the graph below we see that non-disabled trips demonstrate the expected rush-hour peaks, whereas disabled trips have no peak-times.
The data shows that people with limited mobility may have a tendency to avoid use of the tube if other options are available to them, particularly during peak travel times. As indicated in TfL data, 83.9 per cent of disabled trips are made on buses.
In a further effort to explore the relationship between the underground spatial movement of people with disabilities and the above-ground built environment, we visualised underground trips in the above-ground context. One interesting observation that arose from our analysis is that non-disabled freedom pass trips move in a radius of eight kilometres, whereas disabled freedom pass trips move an average of seven kilometres per day.
As another way to make a connection between the flows of underground trips within the greater context of London, with its famous shape and landmarks, we created a visualisation that allows exploration of tube trips throughout London. The visualisation spans the course of a typical week, and allows the user to to interact with the data by navigating the scene and isolating trips to and from any particular underground station.
