Ridesharing and Persons with Disabilities

Where Does The Problem Emerge?

Research has indicated that many of the roughly 55 million people with disabilities in the U.S. face transportation barriers, with 45% of this group lacking access to a personal passenger vehicle . This problem especially applies to persons with visual disabilities. Unlike amputees or persons with partial paralysis, there are no commercially available assistive technologies that enable persons who are blind or those with significant low vision to operate conventional motor vehicles [1]. Ridesharing is an increasingly popular form of transportation that has played an important part in reshaping public transportation.

When it comes to ridesharing for disabilites it is a new way to fix the accessibility issues that exist in formal ways of public transportation. The way ridesharing improves car accessibility for disabled is a step in the right direction.

These real-time services, led by companies like Uber and Lyft, are an increasingly utilized on-demand mobility option that has seen growing use in the United States from 15% to 36% of US adults over the past four years [2]. It is almost certain these companies invest in accessibility research to make their platforms more user–friendly when it comes to the visually impaired.

While these services generally add to the growing transportation options for society, they also hold significant mobility potential for disabled persons unable to operate conventional motor vehicles.

Ridesharing, therefore, may be a viable option for people with disabilities to travel independently without reliance upon friends, family, public transportation, or walking. However, there is a growing but arguably insufficient body of research focused on the accessibility of popular ridesharing services for persons with visual disabilities that leans heavily on car accessibility for disabled.

Existing work has looked at trust-building, driver-rider collaboration, situational awareness, and the roles of both driver and passengers in ridesharing [3], [4]. These studies classified the means through which blind or visually impaired (BVI) people establish trust and engage in collaborative navigation with the driver in situational awareness and location verification.

We believe additional research is needed to identity the aspects of the rider-driver interaction that support trust and acceptance of ridesharing by persons with visual disabilities.

To learn more about Seilene and how we might help your company innovate, please reach out: Julian Brinkley, PhD, PMP – julian.brinkley@seilene.com or reach out to our east coast office at us@seilene.com

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References

1. A. Demmitt, “The Transportation Problem: Finding Rides When You Can’t Drive - Visually Impaired: Now What? - VisionAware,” VisionAware, Aug. 20, 2014. https://www.visionaware.org/blog/visually-impaired-now-what/the-transportation-problem-finding-rides-when-you-can%E2%80%99t-drive/12 (accessed Aug. 06, 2018).
2. J. Jiang, “More Americans are using ride-hailing apps,” Pew Research Center, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/04/more-americans-are-using-ride-hailing-apps/ (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).
3. R. N. Brewer and V. Kameswaran, “Understanding Trust, Transportation, and Accessibility through Ridesharing,” in Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow Scotland Uk, May 2019, pp. 1–11. doi: 10.1145/3290605.3300425.
4. V. Kameswaran et al., “‘We Can Go Anywhere’: Understanding Independence Through a Case Study of Ride-hailing Use by People with Visual Impairments in Metropolitan India,” Proc ACM Hum-Comput Interact, vol. 2, no. CSCW, p. 85:1-85:24, Nov. 2018, doi: 10.1145/3274354.