Daily mobility of disabled people for healthcare facilities and their accessibility in urban space

Abstract

This paper presents findings from an empirical study of diurnal trips made by disabled people to healthcare facilities distributed across urban space. The study was carried out in the city of Bydgoszcz, Poland, while the subsequent analysis is based on the authors' inventory of healthcare facilities and interviews. Data gathered from interviews with 450 disabled people plus 150 able-bodied members of the same households bring out great differences in daily mobility between the two social categories. The daily mobility of disabled people in relation to healthcare is much more tangible than that involving their non-disabled counterparts. Disabled people opt to commute further and for a longer time to the establishments providing comprehensive medical services of high quality, even if the architectural availability of some of these facilities is unsatisfactory. In contrast, their able-bodied counterparts mostly choose general practitioners situated near to their home areas, rather than travelling to more-distant specialists. Key words

Wybrane aspekty turystyki dostępnej w Krakowie w opinii studentów z niepełnosprawnością

“…Preiser i E. Ostroff (2001). Jest wielu innych autorów, którzy również zajmują się tematyką dotyczącą choćby dostępności budynków, systemów transportu czy przestrzeni publicznej dla osób z ograniczoną sprawnością (Czarnecki, Siemiński, 2004;Wysocki, 2009) czy ruchliwości i mobilności osób niepełnosprawnych w przestrzeni miejskiej (Taylor, Józefowicz, 2012a;2012b;2012c;2012d).…”

Expected traffic speed in Poland using Corine land cover, SRTM-3 and detailed population places data

“…Time is also understood to be the cost of achieving a goal (Jain & Lyons, 2008). Studies conducted during the last decade in different European countries (Baradaran & Ramjerdi, 2001;Géza & Á ron, 2011, Ortega, Mancebo, & Otero, 2011, including Poland (Guzik & Kolos, 2003;Komornicki, Rosik, Ś leszyński, & Pomianowski, 2010;Stępniak & Rosik, 2013;Taylor, 2003;Taylor & Józefowicz, 2012;Więckowski et al, 2014) show the importance of shortening travel time if socio-economic development is to be stimulated and living conditions improved, at all territorial scales. This paper includes a map of traffic speeds based on detailed topographic data obtained from satellites.…”

The city, its inhabitants and the urban living environment in the conditions of advancing motorisation (an example of Poznań)

“…What is more, the traffic building up in tight city centres seriously hampers the movement of privileged vehicles (ambulances, patrol cars, fire engines, cars of power, gas and water-supply emergency services) as well as buses, which makes the level of service and safety of city dwellers clearly worse. This situation also hinders the movement of the disabled, perhaps less because of the wheeled traffic itself than because of how it is separated from pedestrian traffic (Taylor, Józefowicz, 2012). …”

“…With the development of motorisation and the design of spatial-functional patterns of cities intended to accommodate ever heavier wheeled traffic, the opinion about the exclusion of pedestrians in modern cities is formulated ever more frequently and more explicitly (Sheller, Urry, 2002;Gehl, 2010). This exclusion especially concerns the disabled, the elderly, and people with small children, but increasingly also physically fit ones (Taylor, Józefowicz, 2012).…”