Please repair the broken elevator! A participatory value evaluation on policies to improve the accessibility of public transport for people with a disability

An equitable transport system aims to ensure that people with a disability and people without a disability have equal access to important destinations. However, making transport systems equally accessible for people with a disability is costly and governments do not always have the means to realize this goal in the short term. To allocate scarce public resources in line with preferences of people with a disability it is important to involve them in setting priorities. However, there is scant attention for generating such preferences in the literature. This study aims to ameliorate this through conducting a Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) in which 328 citizens with a disability gave a recommendation on the extent to which the government should allocate a simulated limited budget towards nine policies. Moreover, the PVE was conducted with 926 citizens who do not have a disability to investigate the extent to which people with a disability and people without a disability set different priorities towards this topic. The results show that both people with a disability and people without a disability prioritize repairing broken elevators, followed by ensuring that vehicles are better accessible for wheelchairs. Moreover, this prioritization is widely shared among people with different disabilities. The poor situation in the status quo and the effectiveness of a policy option in improving the extent to which people with a disability can (independently) use public transport were the most mentioned arguments by participants to underpin their recommendations in the PVE. This research establishes that citizens prioritize repairing broken elevators among the nine policies offered. Further research may assess how citizens prioritize this policy option against other policy options. Despite some criticism, two out of three respondents supported the use of PVEs for future decision-making processes, in the field of accessible public transport for people with a disability.