Last week, the Community Transport Association (CTA) showed our Transport Strategic Planning team at the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) the innovative and different types of Community Transport in London.
Community Transport provides various services to individuals and groups within local communities. These range from school excursions and shopping trips to scooter loans and voluntary experience. Many Community Transport vehicles are accessible to disabled people of all impairments.
The visit provided an interesting insight into how Community Transport delivers high-quality local solutions to meet different people’s transport needs. We saw how Community Transport can be used to help make London 2012 the most accessible Olympic and Paralympic Games ever.
The ODA's Principal Access Officer, Mark trying out Community Transport:
We were given the opportunity to experience what it is like to travel on several Community Transport buses during a visit to Ealing, Brent and Westway (in Ladbroke Grove).
The journeys were smooth and comfortable, highly efficient and the service was friendly and extremely accommodating. We learnt how specially developed software systems are used to run the operations of the service. This makes the different Community Transport services quick and easy to manage and operate.
While some of the Community Transport projects may differ slightly, the overall objective is a collective one – providing accessible transport to all members of the community.
Having seen the operations and used the services ourselves, we are confident that these projects will make a positive impact on the transport operations in and around London during the Games and beyond. Community Transport will help to ensure that the Games are truly accessible to all members of London’s local communities.
