The Greater Easterhouse area of Glasgow is one of the most deprived areas of Europe. Action programmes are tackling this deprivation with investment to improve housing, employment prospects, health, and education. Within many of these programmes transport is a key theme and this paper describes how community transport is being developed and co-ordinated with public transport to support the transport needs of residents in the area. The paper summarises the findings of a consultancy project for the Greater Easterhouse Development Company and the National Health Service in Glasgow to build on international best practice for urban community transport developing and co-ordinating services within the area. A key focus in Easterhouse is to establish working partnerships towards an integrated community transport approach addressing health inequalities. The project aims to bring together statutory, voluntary and community organisations to address the transport and non transport issues through integrated action. The first step in developing community transport for residents of Greater Easterhouse is therefore to identify the ways in which existing services do not cater for people's needs. The review identified that reasons include: the cost of travel by public transport, particularly where groups are involved; fear of travel by public transport; social needs when travelling particularly for vulnerable people; travel needs at times of day or days of the week when public transport is not available. In recent years, cross cutting policies such as social inclusion and sustainability have provided a framework within which many innovative community transport projects have been funded. Community transport initiatives to improve access to jobs have successfully integrated funding from health, economic development, social inclusion, and transport sources. A particular gap in transport provision was found for access to hospital for cancer patients. Research shows that the well being of patients travelling to and from hospital affects their likelihood of recovery. Community transport depends on volunteers but in deprived areas with weak community capacity there are often fewer volunteers. People volunteer for a variety of reasons and there is a need to build community transport around these motivations. It is considered important to ensure that the demands placed on community transport schemes are consistent with the capabilities of the community and its staff and volunteers. The creation of a single despatch centre, through which all requests for transport pass, is regarded as the best way of ensuring adequate access to health care by community schemes, as it should deploy resources more efficiently and achieve better co-ordination. Within a deprived area, community transport can be an important intermediate labour market. For long term unemployed people the development of skills in driving or support services for community transport has proved to be highly successful as a route back to full employment. For the covering abstract see ITRD E126595.
Samenvatting