In June 1988, the committee on specialized transportation of the Transportation Research Board conducted a state-of-research review in the field of transportation for people with disabilities. The review identified a limited number of areas in which insufficient research was being conducted in relation to the mobility needs and preferences of disabled people. One such area is public policy and private sector roles in promoting the supply and demand for privately licensed cars and vans. While substantial research has been, and is being conducted with regard to technology and driver education and rehabilitation, virtually no systematic study could be identified on the question of policy. To establish a basis for research in the area of private vehicle access, the Committee on Specialized Transportation held a targeted workshop designed to identify a framework of key issues and priorities in each area to guide future research. The next section describes the general workshop strategy. Section 3 summarizes the structure and approach to the workshop on private vehicle access, held in May 1991, in Detroit, Michigan. The final section presents a brief overview of the workshop's key findings. A key finding was that car prices were often disproportionately high for disabled people. In particular the workshop group saw as one role of policy minimizing vehicle modification costs, and vehicle insurance rates for people with disabilities. The workshop thus came to the conclusion that a major research effort is needed on the structure of the vehicle manufacturing industry as it affects the supply of cars and vans for disabled drivers. It was hypothesized that the number of existing and potential disabled drivers appears to indicate that a potentially profitable market niche could be developed under the right policy framework.
Samenvatting