1. Problem Statement

1.1. Importance of Research

Visitors to a foreign city know all too well the loss of independent travel when confronted with signage in an unfamiliar language.   Street corners cannot be identified, people cannot tell where the buses that pass them are going, transit stations and mode changes are confusing, public buildings are hard to negotiate, and even finding the proper washroom can present a problem.  Imagine a world without signs.  One would not know where trains and busses went, know where to find an information booth, or understand the cues necessary for navigating a city or even a building.   Consider then the trials of blind travelers.   Besides seeing no signs to inform their orientation and information needs, they do not even see what the world around them looks like.

Information, which aids accessibility, is the key to increased public transit usage for the blind (Golledge & Marston, 1999; Golledge, Marston, & Costanzo, 1997; Marston, Golledge, & Costanzo, 1997) .  For people who are blind of have low vision (hereafter, “people who are blind”), this often translates into an ability to find appropriate locations where facilities can be boarded or locations where information about routes or frequency of travel can be obtained.  For the general population, signs readily accessed by vision provide this information, if they are of good quality, effectively placed, and contain accurate and concise information.   These signs include indicators of bus stops, terminal entrances, or printed schedules, which are experienced first-hand and up close by the potential user.  Information about vehicles is carried in the form of numbers, routes, or destinations indicated at the front, rear, and sides of vehicles.   The latter can be observed at some distance if vision is acute enough.   Vision is the premier sensory modality for travel and navigation, and, in the absence of vision, inferior cues must be used.   This research examines how vision-impaired people can overcome functional barriers caused by lack of vision and examines how to make a city more accessible to this population.  The specific bottlenecks and barriers to travel faced in the pursuit of urban opportunities for the vision-impaired are examined in this dissertation.

1.1.1. An Accessible City
A major change in urban form has taken place in the last half of the 20th Century.  The decentralization of cities has meant that not only do people move further away from the urban center but also that many jobs have followed into less dense areas which are under-served by transit.   This has left the urban poor, minorities, and other people who do not drive a car at a clear disadvantage.  Those that work find that they must make long and arduous reverse commutes using transit, often having to make several transfers or mode changes.   Information about these transfers can be hard to find in an easy manner, and, for the blind and vision-impaired, it is often difficult to incorporate this information and integrate it into an acceptable travel plan.

Funding and support for public transit lags far behind the resources committed to the automobile and its infrastructure.   Less attention has been paid to making it more attractive, easier to use, or safer.  In many areas, transit riders are treated as “second-class” citizens, and their continued patronage is assumed because they have no alternative and are “transit dependent.”   Making transit more user-friendly may help increase ridership, which in turn helps make cities more accessible.   One view that has been expressed is that “public transportation is all about anxiety, uncertainty, and waiting - usually in uncomfortable and often unsafe areas” (Hepworth & Ducatel, 1992, p.  139) .  What can be done to make transit more attractive?  “The goal of Intelligent Transportation Systems   (ITS) technology applied to public transportation is to generate and utilize information to mitigate these negative aspects as well as to increase productivity of public transportation systems, so that ridership will increase, thereby reducing automobile travel and congestion while supporting desired urban forms” (Hodge & Morrill, 1996, p.729) .  However, this information is not readily accessible to some people and that is the main research problem.

1.1.2. Problem Rationale
The processes involved in mobility and orientation are still imperfectly understood in terms of what knowledge is required and how it should be presented to pedestrians.
Moreover, the wealth of information available through visual cues, signs and maps is denied to visually impaired or blind travelers.   They are unable to read print on signs, to make sense of a series of numbers and letters that designate routes and schedules, or perhaps cannot even locate where suitably accessible information (Braille or verbal information) is available.  Although the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 has provided the legal incentives for improvement in transportation systems and vehicles for access by different disabled populations, most of the activity to date has involved retrofitting sidewalks, buildings, and vehicles to allow easy access by those who use wheelchairs or have other ambulatory disabilities.   Recently, there has been some attention paid to determining the types of changes that could materially assist other disabled groups, including the blind and vision-impaired, in the context of helping them find their way or move about complex environments (Bentzen, Crandall, & Myers, 1999; Bentzen & Mitchell, 1995; Bentzen, Myers, & Crandall, 1995; Brabyn, 1985; Crandall, Bentzen, & Myers, 1996; Crandall, Bentzen, Rosen, & Mitchell, 1994; Crandall, Bentzen, & Meyers, 1998; Crandall, Bentzen, & Myers, 1995, 1999; Crandall, Bentzen, Myers, & Mitchell, 1995; Crandall, Brabyn, Bentzen, & Myers, 1999; Crandall & Geary, 1993; Golledge, 1993; Golledge, Blades, Kitchin, & Jacobson, 1999; Golledge, Costanzo, & Marston, 1995, 1996; Golledge, Kitchin, Blades, & Jacobson, 2001; Golledge, Klatzky, & Loomis, 1996; Golledge, Loomis, & Klatzky, 1997; Golledge, Loomis, Klatzky, Flury, & Yang, 1991; Golledge & Marston, 1999; Golledge, Marston, & Costanzo, 1996; Golledge, et al., 1997; Marston & Golledge, 1998a, 1998b; Marston & Golledge, 2000; Marston, et al., 1997) .

The 1990 Census showed that disabled people make far fewer trips than the rest of the population, and Marston, et al.  (1997) showed that vision-impaired subjects reported limited trip taking and activities.   Nationwide, less than half of all disabled travelers use public transportation (Corn & Sacks, 1994) .  Clark-Carter, Heyes, & Howarth, (1986) reported that at least 30 percent of persons with vision impairment or blindness make no independent trips outside the home.   Since legally blind people do not drive, this also has a negative impact on their access to work and limits their activity choices.   Recent research (Golledge et al., 1995; Golledge & Marston, 1999; Golledge et al., 1997; Marston & Golledge, 1998a, 1998b; Marston & Golledge, 2000; Marston et al., 1997) into why people who are blind or vision-impaired do not use public transit has shown that perhaps the most important thing that is lacking for this group is access to information.

Less than one third of working age blind and vision-impaired people are employed (Kirchner, Schmeidler, & Todorov, 1999) .  Marston & Golledge (2000), and Marston et al. (1997) suggest that this is in no small part due to the lack of appropriate transportation facilities.  These include public transit and other means to allow an individual to go from home-base to a work destination in a timely manner.  They further report that even those with access to public transit of one form or another have continuous and ongoing difficulty in gaining information about schedules, timeliness of transit modes, and difficulties when changing modes in mid-trip.  They report problems in finding the appropriate stop on a public street or near a major terminal where a vehicle halts for embarkation and disembarkation.   Golledge et al. (1997) found that, for their blind and vision-impaired subjects, 70 percent said that finding where to board a bus was “somewhat difficult” or even harder.   Most of the participants (85%) agreed that it was ”difficult”, “often difficult”, or “always difficult” to find pick-up points for transfers, and 89 percent said it was always or often difficult to find a transfer point when crossing a street.  With these facts in mind, researchers have begun to pay more attention to the problem of getting appropriate information (that is often displayed on signs accessible by vision) to these vision deficit populations.   It is believed that these obstacles reduce transit use and lead to restrictions on access to urban opportunities and self-sufficient lifestyles.

In addition to the problems faced by the blind traveler when confronted with printed information, such as schedules and vehicle identification, they also face several other problems, especially in new environments.   Without vision, the ability to gain suitable and sufficient information about the environment and its spatial arrangements, to enable a person to independently understand and navigate unfamiliar areas, is restricted.   This research looks at the difficulty in getting the following types of information when navigating without sight.