SPECIAL TRANSPORT SERVICES FOR ELDERLY AND DISABLED PEOPLE. FINAL REPORT

This report provides a comprehensive guide to the nature and extent of special transport (ambulance, social services, education departments and voluntary) in Britain, with particular reference to two study areas: Coventry and New Malden (East Sussex). On the supply side the report breaks new ground in collecting detailed data on vehicle use, which allow accurate assessment of productivity and efficiency. The main conclusions from this work are that productivity is generally high, given the constraints of the particular services. The constraints of the hospital appointments system suggest that inclusion of the ambulance service in such a coordination is likely to be difficult, and cost savings in this case are likely to be small anyway. In contrast school minibuses are exceptionally poorly utilized and could be combined into local vehicle pools. Local authority social services vehicles could also, in many cases, be used to provide a much more flexible public transport service for elderly and disabled people, especially in rural areas. On the demand side, a number of approaches to measuring social needs are considered, and travel patterns and difficulties experienced by elderly and disabled people are examined. The main conclusion to emerge from this is that it is not enough to ensure that people have the opportunity of traveling, but the extent to which they want to travel or to receive visits at home must also be taken into consideration. This suggests that a considerable amount of data is required; the study has attempted to show how this can be collected relatively simply and how it can be used selectively. In the last section of the report examples show how data on existing special transport services can be combined with data on social needs to form a basis for policy consideration. (TRRL)