Episode 94: Ride-hailing for People with Disabilities with Abigail Cochran (Road Scholars pt. 4)

Madeline Brozen 0:00
Hello, this is the Housing Voice Podcast, and I'm today's host, Madeline Brozen.
Today we're bringing you the last installment in our four-part Road Scholars miniseries. The journey has explored how housing costs negatively affect transit ridership, how providing less parking can change people's car ownership without negatively impacting employment or mobility, and why and how cities can consider equity approaches in micro mobility.
Before I introduce what we have lined up for today, I've got a favor to ask. Please reach out and let me, Shane, or the royal we at the Lewis Center know what you thought about this transportation detour. Are you a transportation person who appreciates having this time and wants more? Are you a houser who appreciated learning something outside of your expertise? Or the opposite, would you rather Housing Voice stays in its lane? Are you someone else with another opinion? Let us know. We'll use your feedback to figure out if Road Scholars is something worth bringing back.
Today's episode is with University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Abigail Cochran. We'll discuss her work on how people with disabilities use ride-hailing services, the benefits they get or think they can get, and the barriers they face. Also, what companies and cities can do about their experiences. We start with a useful primer on disability in general. What are the types and extents of disabilities people have in the U.S., and how do these different disabilities affect people's mobility? We then turn to her work based on interviews with people in San Francisco to get people's lived experiences and explain their daily challenges. We don't get into the nitty-gritty of the Americans with Disabilities Act, but I want to remind people before we jump in that ADA requirements are a floor to what people should be provided with. In a world of increasing numbers of private transportation providers, there is a real need to ensure that people with disabilities are not considered as an afterthought, but rather they are key stakeholders that should be included and paid for their expertise on what they can bring to the table. This group has a lot to gain with transportation improvements, but today's conversation shows the various ways that we still have a long journey ahead.
As always, the Housing Voice Podcast enterprise is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and the series is grateful for support from Claudia Bustamante, Irene Marie Cruise, Tiffany Lieu, and your usual host, term producer, Shane Phillips. I'm handing the podcast mic back over to Shane and Mike Lens, who will be back with regularly scheduled Housing Voice content in two weeks. Until then, it's been a great ride, and enjoy today's episode.

Madeline Brozen 3:08
Abigail Cochran is an assistant professor of community and regional planning in the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She studies travel behavior, transportation policy, disability, aging, and health. Thank you for joining us today on Road Scholars, Abby.

Abigail Cochran 3:24
Happy to be here.

Madeline Brozen 3:25 And I'm once again joined by my co-pilot and co-host, Juan Matute. Hey, Juan.

Juan Matute 3:30
Hello, Maddie. Happy to be here.

Madeline Brozen 3:33
Abby, we ask our Road Scholars guests to share a memorable transportation journey that could be memorable for good or less good reasons. What experience would you like to share with us today?

Abigail Cochran 3:43
Well, I came back from a trip to Japan last week for the last two weeks, and so I had a bunch of new transportation experiences, but the most memorable perhaps was riding on the Shinkansen on the bullet train between Kyoto and Nagoya, I think. And I loved it. My partner took a billion pictures of me boarding with things that you probably wouldn't want to photograph otherwise, the small amounts of urban grime that exist in Japan. But I had a wonderful time. It travels very fast. My body is not used to traveling that quickly on ground transportation, and so I definitely got a little bit of cognitive dissonance and motion sickness.

Madeline Brozen 4:27
But I imagine you arrived at your destination on time and very quickly. So what's the trade-off?

Abigail Cochran 4:32
It was worth it. It was worth it.

Juan Matute 4:36
It's very punctual. I was able to go in December and go from Tokyo to Kyoto, and everything was very punctual.

Abigail Cochran 4:43
Very punctual. Very efficient. I also took a bunch of buses, which, inner city buses, which were also very punctual and very efficient, which is something I am less used to in the United States.

Juan Matute 4:55
Indeed.

Madeline Brozen 4:57
Well, we're going to hope that these Japanese transportation experiences translate into our American public transit journey someday in the future. Absolutely. So before we focus on your specific paper today, I'd like to take a moment to just set the stage regarding disability issues and transportation for people with disabilities more broadly. So I'm hoping you can help our listeners understand some of the basics. So can you talk about kind of the categories of disability commonly affecting people's transportation experience and how many people in the United States have a permanent disability that affects their ability to travel outside the home? Your paper estimates that over 40 million people in the US live with a disability of some kind. And I know that the estimates of people with disabilities vary based on how disability is defined. So if you could share a little bit of where that estimate comes from and any thoughts on how useful or other sources that kind of tell a maybe different picture.

Abigail Cochran 5:57
Totally. So disability data is collected very inconsistently. The language used to ask questions about self-report disability vary survey to survey. There have even been previously some inconsistencies in national surveys, though they're working to remedy those now. But anyway, the estimates of how many people in the United States have a permanent disability, they vary widely, as do estimates of how many people have travel limiting disabilities, which are disabilities which limit your ability to travel outside of the home is how the government describes that. So they vary a lot. They vary from anywhere between, let's say, nine to 10% of the United States population to upwards of 25% of the US population, one in four. I pulled up some very recent statistics from the CDC, which the headline here shows this from the 2022 Behavioral Risks Factor Surveillance System, the BRFSS, that more than one in four people in the United States or over 70 million people are estimated to have a disability. And so I wrote that paper, it was published in 2019. I was writing it or excuse me, it was published more recently, but it was the data was collected in 2019. And I was predominantly writing in 2019. And at that time, I believe the 40% estimate came from either the American Community Survey or the CDC, a federal data set, the National Household Travel Survey, which is what I used for other studies to understand people who have these travel limiting disabilities. Those are usually lower estimates than people who have any permanent disability. And those will range the most recent National Household Travel Survey. This was in 2022, estimated that nearly 20 million Americans over age five reported travel limiting disabilities, self-reported travel limiting disabilities. So again, this is a significant number of people. I do also think that that 20 million is likely an under report. For some reasons, maybe we can get into when I talk more about the paper. But disability can affect transportation and travel in all sorts of ways, I would say the most commonly researched ways are for people sort of falling into different primary disability types. So you have people with sensory disabilities, these are vision or hearing disabilities. And that's a population I worked with a lot on this study and others who may have issues navigating or using transportation technologies that require use of certain senses. So require visual cues, require auditory cues, etc. People with physical and mobility related disabilities, and these are usually related to how ambulatory you are, whether you use mobility aids, like wheelchairs, or canes, crutches, those sorts of things. And those people may run into infrastructural issues more often, whether or not they can physically use the again, the vehicle or navigate to transit stopper station, in the case of ride sharing, whether they can sort of navigate into the vehicle. And then people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities may encounter issues using transportation in terms of wayfinding, again, ease of use, ease of payment. And those are just sort of the three I can think of sort of off the top of mind that I think we have some understanding, research based understanding of common barriers that people with disabilities face when they're navigating the transportation system.

Madeline Brozen 9:32
So I think what we can kind of summarize is that there's a lot of people, it's hard to say exactly how many, but at the low end, at least 20 million to much higher. And that there's also a range of ways that it affects people. So a lot of people a lot of different ways.

Abigail Cochran 9:49
Absolutely. And that's something, you know, that's really important to recognize in disability based research that this isn't a monolithic category. Again, it's worth noting that this is the largest minority group in the United States and one that most people are likely to join at least transiently at some stage of life. Most people who have permanent disabilities are older, because many disabilities are acquired by natural processes of aging. And so, yeah, all sorts of things to consider.

Juan Matute 10:18
That brings up a good point. So one thing I've heard from people with disabilities is that at some point, everybody will be affected by disability. It's less of an if, but a when. And there are a lot of situations where the improvements that are made for people with disabilities benefit everyone, regardless of need, the concept of universal design. This is referred to also as the curb cut effect, something that is required because of, for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act, but makes getting around easier for all. But specifically, based on your knowledge and expertise, can you share some of the common issues that people with disabilities may experience when using transportation services? And how do those experiences vary based on the different types of disabilities?

Abigail Cochran 11:09
Yeah, again, a big question, because this is a big group with a lot of varied needs. But I can try to define some of that. And the curb cut effect, I think, is an excellent illustration of how design might be used to accommodate people beyond folks with disabilities. For instance, you cut a curb, maybe it helps a wheelchair user kind of get up to the sidewalk, but it also might help someone posting a stroller or carrying luggage or sort of all sorts of things that might keep them from getting up that step with ease. And so, again, it's an easy effect that makes things more accessible for everyone. I do want to mention, though, with the curb cut effect, and this is something I've been discussing with colleagues and sort of reckoning lately, I think sometimes people use this idea of the curb cut effect or universal design now to kind of minimize or look beyond having to sort of justify making interventions for people with disabilities specifically. And so I have been trying to sort of reframe my discussion of that a little bit more in that the curb cut effect, again, is very, very useful. But I want to emphasize it's useful for both people with disabilities. And as a, you know, as a bonus, it's also useful for non disabled people. And so anyway, thinking about some of these common barriers. So as I said, infrastructural barriers are a big one. These are things related to the built environment, or maybe to certain technologies or the building of certain technologies. So infrastructural barriers, technological barriers, and then I would say there are barriers that affect all of us that are sort of socio economic, demographic, etc. So the infrastructural barriers are big ones. This is when you physically can't access the infrastructure that you would need to access to find or enter a vehicle or navigate to a stop or station and then again use the vehicle. One of my colleagues Prashanth Venkataram, who is now at Cambridge Systematics, I think anyway, he was at UC Davis for a postdoctoral appointment and wrote an interesting work called framing availability and usability of transportation for people with disabilities. It's a paper published in transportation research interdisciplinary perspectives or TRIP, that looks at basically the language we use around disability accessibility in transportation planning and discussions. It emerged, you know, he totally drove this forward. But we had been sort of talking about it just casually. It's something that's often discussed in the disability phase, how we don't have great language for understanding these barriers, because we use accessibility in different ways when we talk about transportation planning, you don't know whether you're referencing accessibility for people with disabilities, accessibility might be different based on all sorts of conditions, it can be different at different times of day, it can be different based on, right, all sorts of other physical conditions and conditions of the environment. So he suggested using words that are a little bit more specific to some of these barrier categories. So he suggests using, what is it usability, which you can have immediate usability or cumulative usability, and then availability, which is provider view availability and user view availability. So provider view and user view, I think is a little easier to understand. And that's whether there are physically vehicles that are available to you. So like using the ride share case, can you actually call an Uber wherever you are geographically, you know, that might be a provider view accessibility piece. And then user view is even if you are able to access that service, is it truly available to you? So if you're a motorized wheelchair user, you need a wheelchair accessible vehicle, is a wheelchair accessible vehicle available to you in your area? And so again, that is one major barrier, right? Like can you access it? Like is the service that will accommodate you and your needs available to you? And then the other side is the usability, like even if it's available, can you use it? And so going back to those infrastructural barriers, right? Can you physically navigate the stairs required? Can you go up staircases easily in order to access again, a platform or go downstairs easily in order to access a platform or something like that? Is there an elevator? Is the elevator usable for you given your mobility needs and mobility aids that you may or may not use? So all sorts of kind of questions of whether the infrastructure fits your body. And then there's this sort of immediate usability question. And this can vary based on, again, the vehicle type, whether certain technologies that might assist you are working or are not working. So there's all sorts of pieces. I'd say the main technological barriers, particularly related to ride sourcing, ride sharing, are ability to navigate a smartphone adeptly with whatever disability you're using, as well as ability to locate the correct vehicle and sort of know with certainty that you are entering and using the correct vehicle.

Juan Matute 16:02
Well, thank you for that overview.

Abigail Cochran 16:05
Yeah.

Madeline Brozen 16:05
Now that I think we've set the stage a little bit, let's dig into your paper, which picks up on a lot of these themes, and we'll make sure that that other paper gets put into the show notes. So the paper that we're going to now talk about in more detail is titled How and Why Do People with Disabilities Use App-Based Ride-Hailing, which was published in 2022 in Case Studies in Transport Policy. You kind of already set this up a little bit. We're going to use ride-hailing and transportation network companies pretty interchangeable in the rest of our discussion. Firstly, we're talking about Uber and Lyft. This qualitative study draws on interviews with 32 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and discusses themes of people with disabilities attitudes and experiences with app-based ride-hailing, as well as smartphones and other modes that they use to get around. You find that many people describe ride-hailing use as empowering, but also daunting for people who are uncomfortable with various aspects of the experience, which we're going to dig into in more detail. You've also described how people's experience with the pickup process, including concerns about discrimination, specific issues for people with wheelchairs, how that kind of all fits into their overall experience and use. But first, can you just tell us about how you got into the topic of transportation issues among people with disabilities and this line of research? And then can you share a bit about who you interviewed for this paper and how you recruited those people?

Abigail Cochran 17:37
Absolutely. So, I got into the topic a little bit by happenstance. I was working for a tech company in San Francisco. I felt very cosmopolitan. Having moved from Tucson, Arizona during my graduate degree, I was working at a startup that made displays for real-time transportation information. So again, 411, I think, was the major sort of player at the time. And now, again, this was a budding company trying to enter that space, and I was interning for them as part of my master's program. One of the founders, one of my colleagues, his mother had a visual impairment of some kind. And so he wanted to make our digital signage products more accessible for people with visual impairments or other disabilities. And so he sort of sent me on an intern's errand to go visit a local advocacy organization for people who are blind or have low vision. And so I visited and met all of these wonderful people, started volunteering with the organization, and was introduced to a community of people who were really wonderful and now were my friends and colleagues. And that was the first time that I had experienced, as a non-disabled person, navigating the world with many people with disabilities and just seeing how, again, how unnecessarily difficult it is and how things that were minor annoyances for me were completely prohibitive for some of these individuals. And that bothered me. And so I was in planning school, and I was doing a PhD, and I thought that maybe there was more to understand and intervene and try to advocate as much as I can and learn as much as I can about what that experience is and what some of those ways are that we could make travel a little bit easier for people with disabilities. So that's how I got into the field writ large. For this study, I recruited, this was a part of my dissertation, and I recruited through several large, locally serving organizations, the organizations that have now grown larger than they were, but two large organizations that serve people with disabilities. One was the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind. And so I ended up recruiting a lot of people with sensory disabilities, with visual impairments specifically as part of this study, and then also through the Center for Independent Living, which is, again, a large disability advocacy organization that was founded and headquartered in Berkeley, California. And so they helped distribute my call for participants, and I was fortunate that there's a very active and engaged population there that was happy to help.

Madeline Brozen 20:20
So in the rest of our conversation, we'll get into a lot of the barriers, and we'll also think about what can planning and policy do to make sure people don't experience those as much. But I do want to kind of start by discussing more of your first finding, which really centers on the benefits of ride-hailing from the perspective of your research subjects. So what do they have to say about how it improved their lives?

Abigail Cochran 20:43
They have a lot to say about how it improved their lives or how it had the potential to improve their lives. So we need to jump back a little bit again, I think, to understand these findings back in time. And I know this wasn't that long ago, but this was – the interviews were conducted in 2018, so I guess seven years ago now. I guess it doesn't feel like that long ago, but it was that long ago. So the interviews were predominantly conducted in 2018, I think a little bit into 2019 maybe. And ride-hailing, it was ubiquitous, but it came on the scene in 2012, really, in a kind of usable way in major markets. Again, I was from Tucson, Arizona. It did not come on the scene until maybe 2016, where I was from. In the Bay Area, it was sort of on the scene in 2012, but it was relatively – the ridership was relatively low. It was still a relatively new service kind of through 2015, 2016. And so 2018, it had certainly taken off and many people were using it, but I wouldn't say that it was – everybody was familiar with it. Maybe a certain demographic of people were familiar users, people sort of like myself who were young and working in tech and relatively transportation and technology adept. But people like my parents, who don't live in a major market and had just sort of heard about Uber and Lyft in the media, were not particularly familiar with it. And so just sort of framing this idea that some people were thinking that this is an everyday service. I know I was at the time, but others were really not thinking about this at all, except maybe it's potential to be cheaper than a cab if you were to need a ride from the airport somewhere, something like that. And so, yeah, back in that time, I recruited all these people. I spoke to people of different ages. Many of my participants were a little bit older and again, that aligns with how the prevalence of disability increases in people in older age groups. And I would say that all of them identified potential in having a greater access to a service that would provide them with point-to-point transportation in theory with ease, that was easily hailed if you were able to use the smartphone and app with ease and that would come and take you where you needed to go. Everybody, disability or otherwise, worries about how they're able to get themselves places. And for most places in the United States, that means that you need to have regular access to a private car to be able to get everywhere you want to go when you want to go there. And so for many of the people I spoke to, they absolutely saw the value in being able to access or hail a private vehicle to take them essentially door to door, but certainly curb to curb whoever they needed to go. And so there's immense benefit, again, there's downsides to taxis, you know, it's certainly at the time were considered the closest competitor service. Yeah, people worried about taxis, we can sort of discuss that maybe with another one of the findings. But I think there's a lot of optimism around ride hailing. But unfortunately, there were also some drawbacks.

Juan Matute 23:58
So many people with disabilities experience the world differently from how those who design places and products intend. Thinking about transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft, how did the people you interviewed experience the trust and reliability or maybe other qualities of this mobility option versus the other options available to them? And I know that trust is a big part of what they're intending to develop in the experience with these systems.

Abigail Cochran 24:31
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, trust is difficult to define, but I know is an important part of the user experience for any of these systems in any transportation system, really, you know, and reliability goes hand in hand with trust in the sense that you trust something if it's reliable, you don't try to tell something if it's unreliable. So I would say for the folks in this sample of folks in this study, that they, again, in accordance with the optimism that people were feeling about this mode, people want to be able to trust this service. They want access, again, to a reliable service that they can trust that they feel safe with to get them to their destination. However, some people didn't feel that way. And I would say predominantly what infringed on that trust was the impersonal nature, perhaps, of using an app to hail a ride. And so again, not having a concierge or a middle person or dispatcher, not having somebody you talk to who sort of assures you that the ride is coming and that, you know, you have an assigned vehicle, they're part of a established like taxi service or outfit. Many people who I spoke to, you know, had used taxis in the past, at least very infrequently, particularly people who had had their disabilities for a long time, right, like people who had acquired their disabilities when they were younger and were now older. And so they had a lot of familiarity with taxi or taxi type services and generally found them to be a bad service, to be untrustworthy, to be unreliable, to be very expensive. I remember one quote when I was looking back at the paper to discuss it today, one of the respondents said that, you know, you're worried about them taking you for a ride, like literally and figuratively. And so that was in reference to not reading the meter, honestly, to someone with a visual impairment who may not be able to read it themselves visually. And so she was saying she has much more trust in the app based mechanisms because she can access that technology using a screen reader. And she knows how much the trip is going to be. And she knows who the driver is and to, you know, what the vehicle plate is and all those sorts of things. Some people felt more trust because of the app based features and some people felt less trust. And I think that really came down to just how familiar they were using a smartphone with their disability.

Madeline Brozen 26:57
You also mentioned, you know, that when you're using the app, there's not a human kind of that you're connecting with. You did bring up that some people in your study had experience with GoGo Grandparent, which is kind of a concierge like version of this. Could you just briefly explain to people that might not be familiar what that is and how much that may have mitigated these trust concerns?

Abigail Cochran 27:19
Yeah, absolutely. And I haven't followed up too much on these concierge type services since writing the paper. And so I'd be curious kind of how they're operating today and how that experience might be different today versus in 2018, 2019. But at the time, the service GoGo Grandparent was offering was a concierge service for, I think, Uber and Lyft, but maybe just one of those services. I'm not sure, in which you call a number and they assist you in hailing a ride, in sourcing one of these at-base vehicle rides. And I think they check in with you a little bit, too, like I think maybe after you've completed the ride or when the ride is arriving, they sort of tell you when that's the case. But essentially, the mechanism is supposed to give you somebody to talk to, to arrange your ride, to feel much more like a taxi-dispatching service. At that time, I believe it was a subscription-based model. And so you subscribe to GoGo Grandparent much like you subscribe to Uber or Lyft. But that was a subscription service where you paid, I think, like a monthly fee or an annual fee. And you can call this number and they would arrange that for you. So if I remember correctly, a few of the participants used GoGo Grandparent. I remember one used it very successfully. She really liked it. She hadn't had any experience using at-base ride hailing on her own. Her children, I believe, her adult children, you know, had been encouraging her to use it for some of her appointments and things. And she had been very concerned about that. But she had had the resources that, again, I think one of her adult children enrolled her in this GoGo Grandparent service. And that helped. I know that Uber, at least for a time, was offering kind of their own concierge service, which was, I believe, an additional charge for seniors. Again, I don't remember exactly what the model was around that. And this was within the last couple of years. But again, some people found GoGo Grandparent really helpful, however, is expensive. And so that's not an option that was available to everyone. It certainly wasn't an option that everybody knew about. And so, yeah, there's some limitation there in that it's not accessible to everyone. But again, could be a good fit for others.

Madeline Brozen 29:28
Yeah. I think that we have, you know, there's a lot of informal GoGo Grandparent type things where, yeah, it's just your adult children are just arranging and sending a ride to an older parent. Right. So but that certainly kind of highlights the way that just kind of the smartphone comfort. A lot of times there's people are like, oh, not everyone has a smartphone. But I think that kind of underestimates just like there are different features in the smartphone that people may or may not be comfortable with. And so, you know, one thing that you talk about is that people who may not have as good motor skills really can just, you know, using the smartphone can be really a barrier. But then also, like as phones have more accessibility features, like screen readers and things of that nature, you may just not know about them or like know how to actually take full advantage. So like a very simple example, maybe people have come across this with their own parents or older adults in their life was like, my dad didn't know that you could increase the font size on the phone. And so I just like did that for him. He's like, oh, my God, I had no idea. And that just really helped him increase his usability. And then the second part, which you kind of talked about a little bit, is just that the experience of finding your car in a ride hail system is just not easy, because especially like in dense parts of cities, it's probably kind of uncommon that your ride hail can come to the exact point that you put on the map, right? Like there may not be parking there. You may not have known that you've done it in a bus stop, which unfortunately, sometimes they'll still stop there. But, you know, maybe up or down the block, other side of the street. But in any case, when you like have a call with the person, you ask them where they are, they're going to probably use visual clues to tell you how to find them. If you're a low vision person, like that's just kind of useless. So can you just tell us more about the smartphone and pick up findings and anything else that was kind of surprising or useful to learn?

Abigail Cochran 31:30
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that this discussion may lead us a little bit earlier than we want to go into discussions of autonomous vehicles and robotaxis. But I'll try to stay on the, you know, still the driven ones before we get on to the autonomous driven taxis. So the smartphone capability or smartphone competency, smartphone literacy, however you want to frame it, I mean, that's a huge thing. It's a huge factor, since our transportation technologies become more intertwined with our, again, communications, information and internet based technologies. And so, again, you know, people know how to use a phone, everybody who would have been alive for my study certainly had experience using a traditional phone. And so that's one technology, again, they were very familiar with. And if they had a smartphone, which they likely did at that time, or maybe close to getting one, knew how to make calls and maybe receive texts and that sort of thing. But not everybody is familiar, you know, why would you be necessarily, if you haven't spent a ton of time with it, you haven't grown up with it, with all of these different features. And so Uber and Lyft, I mean, they are, can be an extremely convenient service. But that's if you're pretty literate with using the phone, and I know they're, they're always trying to make their user experience more accessible, and more usable, more user friendly. But anyway, it's just the idea of it, I think is daunting for people just because it's unfamiliar. And I mean, this is the case with any sort of really anything, but I think about it a lot in transportation, because often issues with transportation arise, not necessarily because something is entirely unavailable to you, you just don't know about it. So again, I do a lot of work now on non-emergency medical transportation, I know Maddie has as well. And that's a service that in theory could fill the gaps for many people, but very, very few people know about it, how to use it, and whether or not it's available to them. And so again, the same thing with smartphones, you may, you just may not know that that's an option available. And it varied a ton, again, not based on people's type of disability, or even their age, it was really more of a, how long have you been practicing or experiencing this technology with your disability, right? Have you discovered that you can make the font size larger? Have you been trained in how to use this app navigating with a screen reader? Have you, you know, all sorts of these, you know, like relatively low barriers, but they're significant barriers when you just don't know that it's available to you. And so that was something I found to be really indicative of how comfortable or how optimistic people were about using ride healing was just how comfortable and optimistic they were about being able to use their phone adeptly. And so that was a big piece. And then, so finding the car, this is quite a challenge. So you talked about in places where again, first of all, your location beacon might not be exactly where you think it is, even if you put in the correct address, it might drop the point a little farther away. And so several of my respondents, and I've also encountered this now anecdotally with all sorts of friends, visual impairments encounter what, again, one of my respondents called, I believe the last 10 foot problem or something like that in transportation, we often talk about the first or last mile, which is the difficulty in reaching whatever is your destination from a transit stopper station or right from a kind of point to point transportation service. But again, these last 10 feet, the last 20 feet, these last 50 feet between the curb and the door, or between wherever you are and wherever the car is, can be very challenging for someone to navigate without sight or again, potentially with intellectual or cognitive disabilities. This is more of a challenge than you think it might be because so much relies on you, the user being able to visually identify a car, as well as to some extent on a driver being able to visually identify you coming to the car. And so this was challenging for many of my respondents in the study and again, many other people I know with visual impairments. And there's a few reasons why it was challenging. One it was challenging because at that time, the app didn't incorporate some of the features it does now, although the features now may not help everybody. So what I mean by that is now they put the make and model of the car, the license plate number, and I can't remember if there's anything additional, but they have at least the license plate and the make and model of the car. So if you are able to sort of read that print or a screen reader reads it out to you, at least you have some additional information to identify the vehicle. However, without sight, that still may be very challenging because you won't be able to visually identify it if it comes, I mean, you can describe it to somebody else, but again, it's still not exactly where you'd hope that be. And so many of these riders rely on that the driver is in the right spot, that they are in the right spot, given where the GPS coordinate would put the pickup, and that the driver will be able to visually identify them. So then the question becomes, how do you make yourself more visually identifiable to the driver without either compromising your immediate safety, or potentially making yourself sort of more visible for things like discrimination against someone, right, who uses a mobility aid with a visible disability? And so I remember having a conversation with one of the respondents in this study about, you know, she felt very conflicted and another one as well, he felt very conflicted about whether or not to include a picture of him using a white cane in his little user picture. Or again, people with service animals are very, very hesitant to do this because they fear driver discrimination against them and their service animal. And so, yeah, it's a difficult conundrum. I don't know that a ton of people have overcome it. I know that one strategy that's been proposed is to give an audible cue when your vehicle arrives. So basically, it will give you a unique audio signature to know that it's picking you up, you know, this wouldn't be something super identifiable, like car for Maddie going, you know, this or that it would be more like some tone that, you know, plays to you through the app, and then that the car plays as well. There's, again, still some safety concerns associated with that the driver would need to be really careful about exactly where they were parked. And it might be hard to discern the audio cues among a bunch of others. But this is the approach they're taking when they're designing accessibility features for autonomous vehicles for autonomous taxis, that basically you will be able to find the car because it will make an audio cue to you that you will know and be able to navigate to it.

Juan Matute 38:10
And with the autonomous vehicles, one thing that I've noted in doing some research is that they have so many cameras and sensors that they can develop a 360 degree picture. And they can probably with user permission, engage in facial recognition to get a sense of where the passenger is. I don't think they're doing that now. But as you mentioned, there could be other cues. Are there any recommendations you would have for automated vehicle or robo taxi type companies?

Abigail Cochran 38:41
Again, there are plenty I've had, but I guess my main recommendation would be to make sure you're consulting with actual users with disabilities, right? This is a market that can, will and does use transportation and certainly will want to be abreast to these technologies, which, again, provide more convenient, potentially point to point transportation. And so, yeah, I would say try to, again, consult from the design phase, hire people with disabilities to be a part of that process from beginning to end. I can, again, I personally can foresee things like audio cues being helpful, navigation features of the app itself that will recognize where the car is relative to where you are and navigate you to the car with sort of step by step type directions. And those are sort of from beacon technologies back from when I was working at that transportation signage company. That was sort of what we were looking to use to try to make some of these signs more accessible. So these are technologies that have existed for a long time, right, Bluetooth technologies, that sort of thing, but that you could probably use in creative ways if the resources and intent were there to make that experience a little bit easier.

Madeline Brozen 39:47
Yeah, I mean, you can kind of just think about anytime you're trying to find a friend in the crowd, right, and like, how do you kind of say like, okay, if one person can see one other person, they can't see you, you know, you're saying go left, go right, like there's definitely navigation that's probably very useful, especially when what you're communicating with has a really structured sense of the built environment through all of these technologies.

Abigail Cochran 40:12
Yeah. Well, and the thing that's interesting to think about with this now, Maddie, and something you said sort of cued this up in my head earlier is, you know, you might experience issues and problems where you're sort of too visible, or there's too much space between you and the vehicle. So maybe it kind of a lower density market or a lower density pickup point. But you also experience a lot of issues when you're in a really high density market. And those are likely to be again, the biggest, like the most used, the most high demand, the most saturated markets. And so it was interesting to do a study in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now think about it, that I'm living in a much more, you know, in a much smaller city, and generally a much more kind of rural area and state, and think about how these issues manifest in very high density or very populous places, as well as how they manifest in very low density places.

Madeline Brozen 41:00
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, maybe this cues up, maybe you're already working on this, but you know, most of I think our transportation research on new mobility comes from dense urban places. Makes sense. You know, it's very complicated. There's also the markets where these services are going into, but that's actually not where the majority of people in the United States live. And so if we want to think about kind of widespread use and applicability to people, you know, we're going to have to get some of these studies out of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Abigail Cochran 41:31
Yeah, exactly. Who's listening? Well, but it's a chicken and egg issue. And I know we talk about this in all sorts of transportation, you know, you can't really study it until it's available. And it doesn't really become available, at least not from the private market until there's enough demand evidence, like evidence to demand to support it. And so, yeah, again, it's an ever plaguing transportation problem that in order to, you know, have or expand or scale a service, you need customers, you need riders, but you're not going to have riders until a service is available to you to ride.

Madeline Brozen 42:06
Yeah. Well, I want to go back to something we've kind of hit on a few different times. But it's really about the discrimination that people in your study faced and discrimination that they had heard that their friends had faced. You know, this is both about using wheelchairs and service animals. And a lot of actually the people it seemed like weren't really even using very, you know, heavy motorized wheelchairs that really require like a separate vehicle, right? Like, these are people that have wheelchairs that can fit into a trunk. But you know, this was something that made a really bad experience. Anyone that's experienced discrimination in any type of form, it just shapes how you think about a service, your willingness to use it. But so what can you share about, you know, what people face and what they kind of had to do to avoid this potentially promising, useful way of getting around where they would have their rides like canceled or just rejected?

Abigail Cochran 43:03
Yeah, this is a huge issue, driver discrimination against riders with visible disabilities, but particularly users with service animals. And I can understand, you know, I don't understand discrimination, obviously. But I can understand from the driver's perspective why they would be wary to have an animal in the car. However, there are legal and regulatory structures that allow service animals in places that maybe, you know, you wouldn't be able to bring your pet. And so, you know, there's legal and ethical responsibility to allow those types of riders. So even though the company, right, companies maintain that they do not discriminate based on service animals, they maintain a sort of company-wide platform that they will not discriminate on riders who have legitimate service animals. The problem is you as an individual driver can't identify easily who has a legitimate or an illegitimate animal. And so I believe many drivers have also felt unduly burdened or harassed or aggressed by people bringing in animals that aren't trained to service animals, make a huge mess or, you know, otherwise, you know, or barking or scary or biting or, you know, all sorts of things. So again, I can see this from both sides. I am empathetic to drivers not wanting to face, you know, harassment by an animal. But this is really, really challenging for riders who have service animals, who have legitimate service animals. When I conducted this study, again, this was 2018. This was seven years ago now. However, this issue hasn't really abated, at least not by my understanding by, you know, my studies since then, though not specifically about this issue, discussing with colleagues and discussion with friends. This issue hasn't really gone down. And until there is, I guess, better enforcement mechanisms or better, some sort of better way to ensure that drivers aren't discriminating in their pickups and that riders are being responsible in the animals or mobility aids that they're bringing into the vehicle, then I don't see how it's improved. But as recently as this fall, there were major protests in San Francisco by the National Federation for the Blind and elsewhere all over the country against driver discrimination against riders traveling with service animals.

Madeline Brozen 45:25
And it seemed like one thing is like that people would kind of hide from their driver or hide their animal. How do you share more about that, just like the mitigation part of it?

Abigail Cochran 45:37
Yeah, so again, a few respondents shared the story to try to mitigate how often they were canceled on or ditched or many respondents described who traveled with service animals described hearing a car pull up and then hearing the car drive off sort of when they saw the service animal. And so, again, I believe this problem is still quite widespread and poorly enforced. But, yeah, I mean, it's kind of comical, but it's comical in a pretty dark way. Some of these sort of workarounds that people were telling me about that they try to use to make sure that they get their ride, they'll try to hide themselves or their dog and have someone who's not traveling with an animal. Maybe if they have a companion traveling who uses a cane or doesn't use a mobility aid, have them kind of wave the car down and then bring out the secret, secret service dog, not to be concerned with the dog in the secret service, have them bring out a dog and get in the car. So there are all sorts of weird workarounds. But obviously, these weren't always effective. Two, they put a lot of extra stress and anxiety and just anguish around using the service at all. And three, there's once again, safety concerns that potentially come up with making yourself more visible in these public places as a person with disability, as a person who's hired a car, you know, you never know where you are. And I understand wanting privacy and wanting to, you know, to be feel safe and comfortable in public spaces. And so I think sometimes these maneuvers were very challenging for people because there's there's no kind of winning. And then the case with discrimination based on mobility aids, again, this is certainly less commonly reported in like media, but I heard it relatively frequently among my respondents. And again, I've noted this in other cases where drivers, you know, they are concerned, they don't necessarily want to go through the hassle of having to accommodate a mobility aid. And so that's another thing where drivers are trained to accommodate acceptable or appropriate, I guess, mobility aids in their vehicles. And so this is really just another instance of kind of discrimination or bias where I have empathy towards both sides. Because again, it's one of those things where if you're not being paid for the, you know, small amount of extra labor that it might require in order to load and unload a vehicle or accommodate someone, I can understand why, again, the service model doesn't incentivize that type of service. And so unfortunately, it results in poor outcomes for riders with disabilities who want to use it.

Juan Matute 48:11
I read a discussion recently on this topic on the Lyft driver subreddit. So it was just anecdotal information from several drivers. And they mentioned some of the issues that you had brought up as concerns for the drivers. One of the thing they also mentioned is that the Lyft setting has changed or is now that somebody who has designated that they have a service animal within the app is no longer subject to cancellation fees. And so drivers noted a lot of abuse of that, where people without service animals would call a driver, try to negotiate a better price and then cancel if they couldn't. So yeah, every technological fix can create its own new problems, perhaps.

Abigail Cochran 48:56
Yeah, but that's a space that I think we should continue to give attention to the idea of sort of again, making systems that incentivize unbiased, anti discriminatory pickups, as well as you know, comfortable rides and non abuses of these systems by riders.

Juan Matute 49:15
Yeah, so perhaps there is a role for government transportation agencies, most ride hail companies are state regulated, but there's also other many other government agencies involved in the delivery and regulation of transportation services. So what would you suggest for those working at government agencies, those considering governance at these agencies, that they can do to better serve the mobility and accessibility needs of people with disabilities, particularly in ride hail, and perhaps robo taxis? And then what are the constraints to doing this?

Abigail Cochran 49:50
Yeah, so I think this may sound a little repetitive, but the same recommendations is making any current system more accessible. But these, you know, for robo taxis, and that sort of thing, you we have an opportunity, potentially, by the fact that these are coming onto the market in a relatively new way. And that they, again, have these regulatory structures where we might have the opportunity now to set kind of legacy policies in place that would facilitate greater equity or accessibility, usability by people with disabilities, or they could go the other way. So we'll see. But my recommendation would be that, you know, you have people with disabilities involved from very early stages from visioning and design to implementation and testing. So that's the main recommendation, just again, making sure that you are understanding what the needs are. The second thing I would say, and politically, I know that this is is controversial right now, but thinking about, again, designing for disability intentionally, not as something that necessarily you would need to retrofit or accommodate after the fact. And so I think there's a lot of opportunities with autonomous vehicle design and autonomous vehicle deployment, to think more critically, right, because we don't have the same types of we have legacy infrastructure, obviously, we have roads and streets and that sort of thing. But to think about how that could serve folks with disabilities better based on how the transportation system has served them historically and presently. So I think there are opportunities to do that. But the things that are about behavior, particularly behaviors around discrimination and bias, individual discrimination and bias are very difficult to confront without giving people access to developing true and real relationships at work and otherwise, with people who are going to be again, using these systems as you brought up one, the people who are designing many of the products, transportation systems and otherwise that we use are not necessarily the people who will be using them regularly. And so I think just making sure that you are understanding the needs, perspectives and insights of the users of anything you're building is the most important thing.

Madeline Brozen 52:07
Juan, I'm wondering your thoughts on curb management approaches in terms of having good places for ride hailing and row taxis to kind of pick up and drop off. And so, yeah, you want to give your thoughts on like curb management as a way to make things better?

Juan Matute 52:23
Well, yeah, the short term uses of the curb are increasing faster than any other use of the curb. So these are the ride hail type pickups, the quick delivery drop offs, either parishibles, restaurant food or maybe goods delivery. And in a lot of places, the management of the curbs has not changed. And so that pushes a lot of this activity into a double parking type of situation where somebody needs to leave the curb. And so my thoughts are just that we need to manage the curb differently to have more empty space on each block that can be used for these quick turnover type of activities, either through the Donald Shoup style pricing the curb so that there's 15 percent availability by block at any given time, or just creating some designated zones for pickup drop off of people and goods and other items.

Madeline Brozen 53:18
So one approach that may be promising and kind of a role for government transportation agencies to ensure that app based services is to just think about affordability. So that's actually not something that's really covered as much in your work. I know there's a lot of intersectionality between disability and income for many different reasons, so we don't have time to get it to today. But I do want to kind of talk about that there are ways that programs that local or transit agencies subsidize transportation costs for people with disabilities. These programs work in different ways in different cities, but kind of a point to point based approach, you know, does help to overcome some of the clunkiness or bad user experience people have had with paratransit, as it usually requires, you know, at least a day, sometimes three days advanced scheduling. There's just a bad customer experience. Pretty much people have been complaining about paratransit since it was created.

Abigail Cochran 54:22
Yeah, it's not seamless. You can't go over political boundaries often on paratransit vehicles.

Madeline Brozen 54:29
Yeah, it's it's just it's not it's not a great experience. And so I think that's partially why, you know, the people in your study saw a lot of promise of having a better point to point option. And so kind of going back to the taxi point and use of taxis is that actually a lot of cities have like a taxi script or kind of like a taxi coupon type program where either older adults or people with disabilities who are aware of the programs, who go through the signup process, who demonstrate their eligibility, who jump through every last hoop, at least can get coupons right for a point to point service. But you explained that this kind of programs have not extended into ride hailing, even though, you know, it seemed like for most people, there was a preference for using ride hail over taxis. So what are your thoughts about the promise or opportunities or if there are any examples of ways to kind of increase access to ride hailing with integration with some of these existing taxi or other subsidy programs?

Abigail Cochran 55:33
Yeah, absolutely. And this is something where things have changed since I wrote the paper. So I appreciate you bringing up the taxi scrip programs, right? This is vouchers that municipalities or transportation agencies would provide to eligible residents to use for taxis, to use for transportation services in order to subsidize transportation costs. The scrip programs was still running when I was still in California when I was conducting this study. But you're basically using you have to go up, you have to go to the place to receive the scrips. You know, one of the respondents, I think, described it as like, or several described it as like monopoly money. You know, like you had to take care of like a roll of monopoly money bills that you would sort of use as your vouchers on these services. So it was pretty cumbersome, you know, like many things. I think it worked for the few people who are very familiar with it and were, again, were regular users. But there weren't too many people who were using that particularly regularly. But affordability is huge. I mean, a big part of whether a service is usable for anyone is whether or not it is affordable to them. And when I was conducting this study, ride-hailing was considered relatively expensive. And now after the COVID-19 pandemic, with some of the changes in ride-hailing service models, it's become much more expensive. And so I would say now more than there used to be, there's more of an impetus to perhaps provide subsidies for some of these rides for people who don't have as many other transportation options available to them as non-disabled people do. So people who currently cannot drive a car independently or don't have the money to maintain again or operate a private vehicle could really benefit from some of these subsidy type services. There are examples from very recently I can think of during the pandemic. I wrote about a few of these programs in which instead of giving physical scripts and recognizing that ride-hailing was becoming more available and more usable in many cities. I know San Francisco did this for sure. LA, I know, had similar programs where they would provide a subsidy essentially to a vehicle-hailing service, whether that was a service like Uber or Lyft, which would require more of this public-private partnership angle or existing taxi agencies. There was a fly taxi, I think was the name of the application they used in San Francisco. And this was an application to hail taxis the same way you would are very similar to how you would hail a Uber or Lyft and that you could use a city subsidy credit towards up to a certain amount. And I know that a lot of people like that. They liked that service. They appreciated that it was slightly more affordable because it was a relatively small fleet. They would often get the same drivers, which could either be a huge positive or a significant negative. But I remember having at least one respondent who really liked using that service, who liked the driver, who liked the subsidy, and who used it a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of these programs were sort of pilot programs during the pandemic to provide transportation when it was critically needed. And some of the funding screams for those have evaporated since the pandemic. And so it's something where I think there are a lot of use cases that have been maybe not given the time to judge how sort of successful they might have been. And so I think this is a case where many other cities could consider investing in subsidy structures, either through an Uber and Lyft type app or, you know, even an inherent platform or a kind of taxi or other public partnership that would alleviate some of those cost burdens that might keep people from using these services.

Madeline Brozen 59:13
Yeah, I mean, it has a lot of opportunity. I think there's a lot of model, but just like everything else in transportation, like where's the money coming from, right? Like, I think it's paratransit is very expensive, and I believe it's an unfunded mandate to provide as well.

Abigail Cochran 59:29
Yes, so paratransit, I mean, paratransit is a really tricky service because it's offered under an unfunded mandate. There are some dedicated funding streams to support senior disabled and rural transportation services, but those are capricious. They go up, they go down, they change perhaps by administration. And so it is a service that is, or at least can be, the model it's run on for a long time, relatively expensive to provide. And it's a low quality service that very few people use. And that's not to say I think sometimes in the past that's been taken as indicative that people with disabilities don't want to travel or don't want to use transportation in any way. And I think that's completely mistaken. It is that they don't want to use that service in particular because it is a low quality service that is unreliable and inconsistent and possibly uncomfortable. And so I think a lot of people, disabled and non-disabled, would be are excited by the idea of having access to a shared, reliable, curb to curb or point to point transportation service, whether that's provided by something like an Uber or Lyft or an autonomous vehicle service.

Madeline Brozen 1:00:37
Yeah, I mean, I think this speaks to just wanting to ensure that people with disabilities have a variety of transportation tools in their toolbox, right? One thing that is interesting is that people that are eligible for access services, which is paratransit in Los Angeles County, the majority of those people are actually just using fixed route transit, right?

Abigail Cochran 1:00:57
Right.

Madeline Brozen 1:00:57
You know, sometimes there are particular trips that are far that they don't know, or like you mentioned, like they can't drive at night, whatever. Like, you know, they do want a paratransit tool for trips where it works, and then they want to use transit when it works and is reliable. So, you know, I feel like a lot of our conversations in this series have just come down to, can we just make the system work better?

Abigail Cochran 1:01:18
Well, that's, you know, I'm constantly telling my students, this is my favorite line, that if you offer a high quality transportation system to anyone, again, it doesn't matter whether you're a rider of particular mobilities or anything like that, you'll use it. People will use good quality transportation systems. If it is the most reliable, convenient and comfortable option, of course they will use it.

Juan Matute 1:01:42
And I'm finding in some work I'm doing now that consistency is key. And so we have over 150 transit agencies in California, and there's some inconsistencies between them and consistency is key for working with people with disabilities.

Abigail Cochran 1:01:57
Yeah, well, you just want something reliable. Again, you know, it's easy to take for granted that as someone who does not have a visible disability or travel limiting disability to just get in a private vehicle or know that I, you know, basically always have access to point to point transportation when I want it relatively comfortably and relatively easily. If that is not available to you, whether because of disability or income or all sorts of other age, you might be too young or, again, too old, then that leaves you without critical options for accessing all sorts of opportunities. And so just thinking about any way we can expand mobility options for everybody, but in the disability case, expand options for people to travel as conveniently and with the same sort of consistency and reliability as disabled folks would be able to access. I think that's that's what you're going for.

Madeline Brozen 1:02:48
Well, you may have kind of set up our last question that might be our place to end on, but is there anything that we didn't talk about in your work or parting words for people that want to think more intentionally about transportation for people with disabilities?

Abigail Cochran 1:03:03
No, I think, again, we covered a lot in this conversation, you know, related to past, present and future technologies that may be coming on the market. But I think the same points I have stressed and will stress again, when you're thinking about trying to design a better transportation system for people with disabilities, the most important thing to do is not to design for necessarily, but design with to do both there, you know, by many estimates, one in four people in the United States have a disability. There are many people with disabilities, right, who want to contribute to this design and implementation, whether in their normal professional setting or otherwise. And so, again, thinking about disability at every stage of the design process, particularly for products that are going to be consumed on mass or that are publicly provided, is very important to continue thinking about. And so the ride hailing space has changed, ride sourcing, ride sharing, TNCs have changed so much, right, even since I was doing the interviews for this paper. And so I'll be interested to continue following and will try to remain optimistic that maybe some of the more now more emerging technologies, I know we used to call those the emerging technologies, but I think they've emerged. So thinking about things like autonomous, shared services, even like drone type services, services sort of beyond our flat plane, about how those can be made more accessible to people with all abilities, I think is the place for folks to be thinking about.

Madeline Brozen 1:04:36
Well, thank you very much for that engaging conversation. And we'll catch you next time on Road Scholars.

Abigail Cochran 1:04:42
Wonderful. Thank you both. I can't believe I'm finally a Road Scholar.

Madeline Brozen 1:04:56
You can read more about Abigail Cochran's work on our website, lewis.ucla.edu, where the show notes and a transcript can be found. The UCLA Lewis Center is on Bluesky and LinkedIn, and I'm on Bluesky at @mbrozen.