Volunteer Evaluation of Wheelchair Accessibility in Vehicles

Abstract

Transportation for people with mobility impairments who use wheelchairs depends on vehicle environments that accommodate their needs for safe and easy-to-use vehicle spaces. Our team created a document titled “Design Guidelines for Accessible Automated Vehicles: Mobility Focus”, which provides design guidelines on how to make passenger vehicles, and particularly autonomous vehicles, accessible for people in wheelchairs. The vehicle aspects addressed include doorways, ramps, lifts, handholds, interior access routes, wheelchair spaces, wheelchair securement, occupant protection for people in wheelchairs, floor surfaces, and operable parts. For each area, we identified good, better, and best recommendations. The volunteer study described in this report was conducted to assess whether the better and best recommendations provided improved accessibility and comfort compared to the good recommendations. Testing results generally did not show significant differences between conditions, which may be due to small sample size and limitations from the combinations of factor available on the test vehicles. However, participant feedback and data on belt fit provide useful information for accessible vehicle design.