Accessible Public Transportation ─ Designing Service for Riders With Disabilities

The United States is home to more than 54 million people with disabilities. This book looks at public transit and transportation systems with a focus on new and emerging needs for individuals with disabilities, including the elderly. The book covers federal law and public policy as well as the various technologies and programs that transportation agencies are exploring or putting into place to accommodate this population in their facilities, vehicles and communities.

Jordana L. Maisel, PhD is the Director of Research Activities at the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDeA), which is housed within the School of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo (UB). She served as a Co-Director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Universal Design and the Built Environment (RERC-UD), and currently serves as a Project Director in the RERC-UD and the RERC on Accessible Public Transportation. She is also an Assistant Research Professor in the School of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning at UB. She has lectured at numerous conferences across the country and has written many peer-reviewed articles. She co-authored the first textbook on universal design, Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments (Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2012).

Aaron Steinfeld, PhD is an associate research professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon and the co-director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Accessible Public Transportation. He earned his Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. in industrial & operations engineering from the University of Michigan (1999, 1994 and 1993, respectively) and completed a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley (2000). Steinfeld’s interest is focused around constrained user interfaces and operator assistance, predominantly in the realms of human-robot interaction, rehabilitation, transportation and intelligent systems. He is interested in how to enable timely and appropriate interaction when interfaces are restricted through design, tasks, the environment, time pressures, and/or user abilities. Two core areas of interest are: Human-Robot Intent Fusion and Appropriate Robot Behavior. Examples of past work includes human-machine interaction and interfaces for collision warning systems, drowsy driving, zero-visibility snowplow operations, advanced in-vehicle systems, head-up displays, real-time captioning, rehabilitation robotics, military robotics, semi and fully autonomous mobile robots, and software agents.

Edward Steinfeld, ArchD, AIA is a registered architect and gerontologist with special interests in universal design, accessibility, and design for the lifespan. He is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, where he has been on the faculty since 1978. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University (1968) and a Masters in Architecture and Doctorate in Architecture from the University of Michigan (1969 and 1972). He is the founding Director of the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDeA), a leading center of excellence in universal deign. Dr. Steinfeld is the Project Director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Universal Design and the Built Environment grant and co-director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Accessible Public Transportation grant. He has over 100 publications and 3 patents. Many of his publications are key references in the fields of accessible and universal design. He was a co-author of Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments. Dr. Steinfeld serves as a consultant to government and industry, and he has received many awards for his contributions to the field.