BUILDING A COMMUNITY INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR

SUPPORTING DISABLED BUS RIDERS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES

Akira Kawaguchi, Andrew Nagel, Chiu Chan

Department of Computer Science, The City College of New York, New York 10031, U.S.A.

Neville A. Parker

CUNY Institue for Transportation Systems, The City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, U.S.A.

Keywords:

Disability support, Assistive technology, Transportation service, Information system, Accessibility improve-

ment, Bus transit service.

Abstract:

This paper discusses the implementation of one type of information system for the New York City bus transit

service, as a case study to provide value-added transportation services for people with impaired mobility.

Information technology is a key tool for ﬁnding ﬂexible transportation services, especially for disabled people.

Useful information supplies psychological reassurance to these vulnerable people to make them feel more safe

and secure. Residents in metropolitan areas increasingly rely on the convenience of public transportation, and

they are becoming used to exchanging information relevant to their regional community in on-line settings.

The improvement to transit accessibility needs the exact same type of the cooperation between transportation

companies, local business, and residents. The widespread use of mobile wheelchairs has a socioeconomic

impact. The signiﬁcance of this research for the longer-term goals lies in its implications for adaptation of this

kind of intelligent model into future welfare or assistive activities.

1 INTRODUCTION

The number of people who are mobility impaired by

age or disability is increasing at a dramatic rate. It is

no longer an insigniﬁcant or silent part of the society.

The 2007 report published by the Department of Eco-

nomic and Social Affairs, Population Division, of the

United Nations estimates the percentage of aged peo-

ple, those over 60 years old, will grow from the cur-

rent 11% of the world population to 15% in 2025 and

to 22% by the year 2050. When considering devel-

oped nations only, the report projects this group will

constitute nearly a third of the population (United Na-

tions, 2007). Moreover, the 2007 fact sheet published

by the International Day of Disabled Persons reports

that around 10% of the world’s population today is

living with some disability. This means that by the

year 2025, it is likely that around 1/5 of the world’s

total population will need economic and social ben-

eﬁts as well as some kind of artiﬁcial perambulatory

assistance in their daily lives.

The United States will certainly face challenges

as people live longer and in better health. Projections

by the U.S. Census Bureau estimate the number of

persons ages 65 and over will grow to almost 40 mil-

lion by the year 2010 (Jones and Sanford, 1996). To-

day, more than 4 million people in the United States

are over the age of 85 and about 60,000 topped age

100. By 2020, the Census Bureau further estimates

that 7 million to 8 million people will be over age 85

and 214,000 will be over age 100. As life expectancy

rises and modern medical technology improves, there

is a growing interest in building more advanced sup-

port structures for society. In particular, a desire to

enhance quality of life with advanced wheelchair de-

signs is a steadily growing phenomenon (First Re-

search, 2007). A strong demand for a less restrictive

environment is also on the rise, such as barrier-free

accesses, safer and more convenient route selections,

more transportation alternatives, and so on.

The motivation for this research is to address

a fundamental question in the handling of these

challenging problems. Today’s transportation in-

frastructure is missing a piece in the context of

wheelchair mobility. Imagine a great inﬂux of people

in wheelchairs having to navigate through crowded

271

Kawaguchi A., Nagel A., Chan C. and A. Parker N.

BUILDING A COMMUNITY INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING DISABLED BUS RIDERS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES.

DOI: 10.5220/0002810902710278

In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology (WEBIST 2010), page

ISBN: 978-989-674-025-2

aisles and streets. Sidewalks can be harmful or even

impassible by those wheelchairs. Correcting these is-

sues universally may require reconsideration of many

issues, including roadway trafﬁc, parking space, and

accident handling, from both engineering and even le-

gal perspectives. In our view, however, today’s infor-

mation systems can be easily, quickly, and cheaply

expanded to enable a dramatic improvement in trans-

portation accessibility by incorporating a community

supported web service so users can objectively eval-

uate whether or not the public transportation services

available address their individual needs. The focus

of our study here is to call for wide-scale commu-

nity support towards the deployment of an informa-

tion system that enables a more future oriented view

of this class of services.

Speciﬁcally, this paper presents one case study

of such a deployment as a means of promoting

grassroots activities supporting handicapped people.

We discuss the development of one type of on-line

database system based on the New York City bus tran-

sit service. This is to demonstrate key roles of the

information technology and community service, not

only in guiding travel route, but also in understand-

ing physical situations in the movement and actual

environment of the wheelchair. The government of-

ﬁces and private sectors in the New York metropoli-

tan area are continuously making systemic reforms

to ensure that services and supports for people with

disabilities are available in the most integrated set-

ting (CIDNY, 2007). The priorities are set for assist-

ing with access to health care, beneﬁts, employment,

housing, and education (MISC, 2006). For instance,

NYHousingSearch.gov

provides a free on-line pub-

lic service to allow disabled people to locate available

housing that meets their individual and family needs

at a rent they can afford (CPANYS, 2007; Paterson,

2009; Appel, 2007). This effort has been supported

by grants to promote effective and enduring improve-

ments in community-based long-term care and sup-

port systems for seniors and people with disabilities.

The question that needs to be answered is the efﬁcacy

of the same approach in transportation issues.

Information resources for the disabled need im-

provement. The government usually requires trans-

portation service providers, such as taxis, limousines

and shuttle services, to purchase accessible vehicles

or otherwise ensure that they have the capacity to

serve people with disabilities (NYAIL, 2009). Yet

limited awareness of these services or lack of conﬁ-

dence in their reliability may discourage use. So lim-

ited availability of accessible transportation services

remains a major barrier faced by individuals with dis-

abilities throughout the state, often leading to unem-

ployment, the inability to access medical care, and

isolation from friends, family, and full community

participation (CIDNY, 2007). For the proposed sys-

tem, it is vital that the people who accept cooperation

and evolution openly share with the living community

by providing useful information. As more informa-

tion becomes available and uploaded to the database,

the scale and magnitude of support will grow. We will

describe ideas on how to involve activities at the lo-

cal level in this regard. Non-handicapped people need

to make a greater effort to educate themselves about

disability issues or risk being unprepared for the com-

ing increase in the mobility impaired population. This

community can play an important role in providing a

respectful environment for the discussion and explo-

ration of these issues. Paired with the primary motive

of making it easier for the disabled to access reliable

transportation, this system stands to beneﬁt all seg-

ments of society.

Paper Organization. The rest of this paper is orga-

nized as follows: Section 2 explains our motivation

for this research and scope of our work. Section 3

discusses our case study of the implementation of the

NYC bus transit service for disabled riders, and Sec-

tion 4 summarizes our approach for extending this

system to incorporate community-support and busi-

ness incentives. Section 5 discusses related work, and

Section 6 concludes our work presented in this paper.

2 WHY DO WE NEED

COMMUNITY SUPPORT?

The demand for wheelchairs and other mobility de-

vices in the U.S. is projected to increase 5.0% per

year through 2010 to over $3 billion (Supplier Rela-

tions, 2007). According to the 2005 Survey of Income

and Program Participation report (Brault, 2008), 27.4

million people of age 15 and older (11.9% of U.S.

population) had difﬁculty with ambulatory activities

of the lower body, thus required mobility assistance.

About 22.6 million people (9.8%) had difﬁculty walk-

ing a quarter of a mile, and 12.7 million were not

able to perform this activity. About 21.8 million peo-

ple (9.4%) had difﬁculty climbing a ﬂight of stairs,

and 7.4 million of them were not able to do it at all.

Roughly 3.3 million people (1.4 %) used a wheelchair

or similar device, and 10.2 million (4.4 %) used a

cane, crutches, or walker to assist with mobility.

Advances in electronic controls, latter-generation

secondary batteries, light-weight construction materi-

als and other areas are also stimulating the growth in

both the wheelchair- and non-wheelchair-related seg-

WEBIST 2010 - 6th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies

272

ments of the personal mobility device industry. Tech-

nology for the computerized aid, care, and support of

people in mobile wheelchairs is evolving rapidly. Al-

though it is in a branch that spans autonomous pro-

cess control, intelligent engineering systems, and in-

formation management, there exists no widely ac-

cepted practice or reference model that leads to the in-

tegration of these technical elements into mass trans-

portation systems (NCODH, 2005). This research

aims to explore several key issues in implementing

assistive infrastructures and surrounding information

systems that host macro control for the smooth and

safe navigation of mobile wheelchairs in the public

transportation environment (Kawaguchi et al., 2008a;

Kawaguchi et al., 2008b; Kawaguchi and Chan, 2009;

Kawaguchi et al., 2009).

Today’s physical infrastructure shows a signiﬁ-

cant transformation that makes it more accessible to

wheelchair users. This transformation has been ini-

tiated by legislative reform and longstanding social

momentum to include people with disabilities as more

active participants in the society (ILO, 2007). De-

spite these efforts, many aspects remain uncertain as

to how to best address these issues in both private or-

ganizations and the local community. For the last sev-

eral years, the metropolitan community in the U.S.

has become increasingly aware of the need to get

more involved in supporting vulnerable people. No-

ticeable changes are visible in many cities and parts

of the world, such as the installation of elevators,

transit lifts, and wheelchair ramps in public areas.

These improvements are increasingly legally required

for access to public areas such as city streets, pub-

lic buildings, and restrooms, thus allowing people in

wheelchairs and with other mobility impairments to

use public sidewalks and public transit more easily

and safely. The efforts presented in this paper share

the same spirit of this ongoing change and intelligent

design movement.

The importance of community support will in-

evitably grow, which will in turn stimulate the de-

velopment and deployment of an information prod-

uct and a practice including a wide range of activ-

ities spanning design, instrumentation, computer in-

tegration, process and device control, and manufac-

turing (Kawaguchi et al., 2008a; Kawaguchi et al.,

2008b). The successful implementation mandates

not only interdisciplinary effort across the industrial

and academic research spectrum, but also participa-

tion and cooperation of wheelchair users, transporta-

tion companies, disability advocates, and voluntary

experts in public. Overall, it is a continuous pro-

cess in which users in all parties participate actively

from the preliminary study stage to the post evalua-

tion stage, so that the knowledge and experience ob-

tained from them can be applied to the next level of

innovation (Ministry of Land and Transport, 2006).

Figure 1: A vision of mobile wheelchair support in the com-

ing age (Kawaguchi et al., 2008a).

Information technology is a key for providing

ﬂexible transportation services and increased choice

for the users (see Figure 1). In addition, useful in-

formation supplies psychological reassurance to vul-

nerable people to make them feel more safe and se-

cure. A federal civil rights procurement law in the

U.S. requires electronic and information technology

to be accessible to people with disabilities. Flexible

services are brought by a wide variety of innovative

information services now in use increasingly in many

countries. For instance, the presence of ubiquitous

network technology that consists of IC tags, wire-

less tags, RFID tags, and other communication equip-

ment such as portable information terminals makes

it possible for elderly people and handicapped peo-

ple to move freely and independently. The use of

more economical PHS communication network gen-

erally available in Asian countries can afford pre-

cise tracking of wheelchairs moving in and around

dense urban areas like hospitals, libraries, and mu-

seums. GIS technology that allows conversion of ge-

ographical information into electronic form also fa-

cilitates the wide-scale integration of navigation as-

sistance and tracking capability into various telecare

information systems.

Up-to-date information services such as availabil-

ity, route guidance, cost, efﬁciency, and safety must

be always available to improve the overall level of

public transportation including railroad, bus, airline,

and shipping. Trafﬁc-aware routing based on portable

GIS device is a new area in vehicle industries. At the

same time, traditionalinternet-basedsoftware that can

handle scheduling, dispatching and reservation, such

as Ecolane DRT, PASS and NaviTrans, plays an im-

BUILDING A COMMUNITY INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING DISABLED BUS RIDERS AND LOCAL

BUSINESSES

273

portant role to implement demand-responsive trans-

portation schemes or ﬂexible door-to-door paratransit

service for wheelchair users.

3 BUS TRANSIT SERVICES FOR

WHEELCHAIR RIDERS

The New York City Transit in the Metropolitan Trans-

portation Authority network operates the world’s

largest ﬂeet of buses (4,373 public buses), serv-

ing over 666 million people per year for New

York City to sustain its economy and support pro-

jected growth (MTA Guide, 2006). These buses are

equipped with wheelchair lifts in either the front or

back entrance of the vehicle, and have a “kneel-

ing” feature that lowers the front entrance to within

inches of the ground for easy access by any customer

with mobility impairments or difﬁculty using the front

steps. The Tokyo Metropolitan Bus Systems in Japan,

by comparison, maintain the second largest scale of

ﬂeet, but do not run this level of service with lift-

equipped vehicles (see Table 1 for the projected im-

provement from Japanese government standpoint).

Table 1: Preset goals for the barrier-free implementations of

Japanese public transportation (Ministry of Land and Trans-

port, 2006).

Transportation Media 2003 2010

Railway cars 24% 30%

Non-step buses 9% 20-25%

Passenger ships 4% 50%

Airplanes 32% 40%

The bus system covers routes not served by the

city subway system and outlying areas, and stops ev-

ery 2 blocks on a nearly 24 hour schedule. The bus

system is becoming the primary mode of transporta-

tion for wheelchair users living in the city. The city

convention and visitors bureaus are offering guides

that list wheelchair-accessible facilities. However,

these brochures are rarely detailed enough to rely on

and can’t contribute to a full-scale mechatronics sup-

port for barrier-free accesses.

An on-line database system to facilitate the ex-

change of useful information among disabled bus rid-

ers and accessibility supporters in New York City

is being built by our efforts. The system has a

Web interface to ﬁnd out the bus routing information

on a trip from one point to another point in Man-

hattan. The capability beyond the “Trip Planner”

web system (Trip Planner, 2009) implemented by the

Metropolitan Transit Authority is to respond using a

map with appropriate paths (sequences of bus rides) to

be taken to reach the destination along with the road-

side information of toilet options, coffee shops and

restaurants accommodating wheelchairs, quick repair

services for motor trouble and battery replacement,

and purchases of wheelchair equipments, etc., on the

selected route. The system works with the Google

Maps API to create the visual interface, thereby giv-

ing a quick way to narrow down the user choice of

accessible sporting and cultural events.

Figure 2: Manhattan Bus Line Map (duplicated from MTA

NYC Transit ofﬁcial site).

3.1 Implementing a Prototype Search

Service Application

A prototype system runs on a typical LAMP (Linux-

Apache-MySQL-PHP) solution stack. The current

release covers the major stopping points and transfer

points of the MTA bus lines whose services are bound

in areas of Manhattan (thus the search capability

is limited within Manhattan). The information

of such trafﬁc points is hand-populated based on

the bus schedules published by the MTA NYC

(see Figure 2). Figure 3 shows a view of the sys-

tem’s interface—our periodic build can be accessed at

http://wikiwiki.engr.ccny.cuny.edu/˜akira/BusSystem.

A trafﬁc point is a geographical location consist-

ing of latitude and longitude. The point collection

is structured as a directed graph in the database. As

shown in Table 2,

buspoints

table holds latitude and

longitude (double type) of the bus running points. Its

ID ﬁeld (smallint type) has a unique point number for

a particular line (char(8) type). Some of the points

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Table 2: MySQL tables representing bus services.

buspoints table busroute table

Line ID Ptype Lat Lng Tag

M1 1 terminal,transfer 40.822 -73.938 W 147St & ...

M1 2 terminal 0.821 -73.936 W 146St & ...

M1 ... ... ... ... ...

M1 33 transfer 40.731 -73.992 E 8th & ...

M1 34 terminal,transfer 40.730 -73.991 E 8th & ...

LineFr IDFr LineTo IDTo Bound

M1 1 M2 null null

M1 2 M1 3 south

M1 ... ... ... ...

M1 34 M1 null south

M1 34 M8 null null

Figure 3: Manhattan bus routing search service system.

are of the type (set type) of terminal, transfer, or both.

The tag ﬁeld (varchar(60) type) is for the text address.

Another

busroutes

table holds route information or

a topological sequence such that one point leads to

another point in each bus line. There can be multiple

directions per line such as South and North, and East

and West bounds, which can be expressed by a bound

indicator (enum type). A transfer point is expressed

using the name of the line for transfer.

A query transaction computes acyclic paths be-

tween start location and destination. The reachabil-

ity set of a directed graph is a maximal set represent-

ing reachability from given starting points to other

points in that graph. Notice that there can be com-

binations of starting points and ending points, each

of which establishes a valid route in close proximity.

This is because the user’s inquiry is usually based on

the addresses of the starting and ending points of a

trip, not precise initial bus points. Therefore, the bus

points approximating the trip must be found within a

range of distance (choice of 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8 mile)

from the speciﬁed addresses. Geocoder public ser-

vice (http://geocoder.us) is used to ﬁnd the latitude

and longitude of the speciﬁed address. Accordingly,

the bus points in the

buspoints

table within the re-

quested distance can be found.

Our implementation of on-the-ﬂy travel path com-

putation is based on a semi-naive evaluation (Bancil-

hon and Ramakrishnan, 1986) employed in the recur-

sive, bottom-up evaluation of logic programs (the al-

gorithm can be realized by an iterative execution of

SQLs). The problem to address is preventing explo-

sive growth of the graph traversals. There can be mul-

tiple ways to complete the trip by hopping around dif-

ferent bus lines. Thus, various heuristic reductions of

search space are devised, in particular, the elimina-

tion of moves ineffectualto reach the destination (e.g.,

south-bound transfer from north-bound trip).

The additional task is ﬁnding points of interest

(eateries, drugstores, etc.) along each possible course

of travel. See Figure 4 for the scheme of the com-

putation. The points of interest are found within the

excess (1/2, 1/4, and 1/8) of a mile outside the bound-

ing box made out of each leg of bus movement. In

Figure 4, two bus stops (line A and B) are found, and

the areas enclosed by their neighboring bus stops can

also be identiﬁed. All the found points are shown to-

gether with the bus route on the generated map. The

entire procedure to process a user request is processed

within a read-uncommitted transaction so as to mini-

mize database overhead. The response time observed

so far using a single quad-core based mid-range data

server is less than several seconds, and is quite satis-

BUILDING A COMMUNITY INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING DISABLED BUS RIDERS AND LOCAL

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275

Figure 4: Finding points of interest.

factory.

4 COMMUNITY SUPPORT FOR

VULNERABLE PEOPLE

For those aging or disabled people whose condi-

tion makes them unable to walk, advanced mobile

wheelchairs provide many beneﬁts, such as main-

taining mobility, continuing or broadening commu-

nity and social activities, conserving strength and en-

ergy, and enhancing their general quality of life. Par-

ticularly residents in metropolitan areas are increas-

ingly utilizing the convenience of public transporta-

tion. Separately, they are becoming used to exchang-

ing information relevant to their community in on-line

settings. The accessibility improvement needs the ex-

act same type of the cooperation between transporta-

tion companies, regional and local industry, and local

residents: transportation companies, private business,

public places, and any points of interest for residents

such as restaurants, shopping centers, movie theaters,

etc., must supply the accessibility information to a

public database system, which in turn provides im-

mediate retrieval for transportation and route selec-

tion, thereby giving great aids to realize macro-level

control in wheelchair movement.

The Web interface of our system has this addi-

tional capability to accumulate community informa-

tion in the form of a point of interest and/or assis-

tive ability. The people in the metropolitan areas

can register and augment categorized information in

the database. Speciﬁcally, a person (e.g., restaurant

owner) can contribute to the system by registering

his/her item (e.g., restaurant) into a set of suitable cat-

egories (e.g., bathroom services, eatery, etc.). The

registration is done by ﬁlling out the owner’s iden-

tity (full name, contact address, phone, and email)

as well as detailing the item to register and the cate-

gory to classify. The information on the item includes

name, address, phone, web URL, geo-position, capac-

ity, up to 3 pictures, textual comment, and a link to

the owner. The category can be chosen from those

already in the database or newly created at the reg-

istration. There may be multiple categories to which

the item needs to belong. For instance, restaurant can

be in the categories of bathroom services and eatery.

Figure 5: Finding interest points with bus line.

The registration of the item is not immediately re-

ﬂected in the database, but becomes pending at ﬁrst.

An administrator of the system needs to inspect if the

requested registration is valid or not. Email is gen-

erated to the owner right after the administrator’s de-

cision. Category classiﬁcation is not static. The ad-

ministrator can reorganize it by merging and splitting

branches. The registered items whose locations are

close to the suggested course of travel are selectively

shown in the Google Map interface (see Figure 5).

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276

5 RELATED WORK

The public acknowledgment of people with disabili-

ties and progress toward enhanced care has developed

in the last few decades along three parallel tracks of

activities (Longmore and Umansky, 2001)—these are

legislation spurred by the disability rights movement,

barrier-free design to universal design movement, and

advances in rehabilitation and assistive technology.

Universal design is a design paradigm that aims to

reduce the physical and attitudinal barriers between

people with and without disabilities. This concept

emerged from barrier-free design principles and as-

sistive technology. The former provides a level of ac-

cessibility for people with disabilities, and the latter

enhances the physical, sensory, and cognitive abilities

of those people (Orpwood, 1990). The concept of uni-

versal design gives a broad-spectrum of solutions that

help everyone, not just people with disabilities, and

it is now becoming one of the most important design

elements that range in scale from product design to

architecture and urban design, and from simple sys-

tems to complex information technologies (NCODH,

2005). The forthcoming transportation facilities are

therefore likely to be in compliance with universal de-

sign principles.

Assistive technology (Cook, 2002) applies to de-

vices that provide direct physical or mental aid to

people with disabilities. The element closely tied

to mobility and mechatronics support is a smart

wheelchair (Simpson, 2005) or an augmentative mo-

bility aid that accepts a variety of different controls

tailored to the riders needs, and complements the rid-

ers efforts by expanding and interpreting their lim-

ited control commands to provide safe transit (CALL

Centre, 1994). A smart wheelchair has a collection

of sensors to work with several cognitive techniques

similar to those developed in mobile robotics, but it is

not necessarily acting autonomously because the aim

is to complement and extend the user’s abilities, not

replace them.

The majority of the smart wheelchairs that have

been developed to date have been tightly integrated

with the underlying power wheelchair, thereby re-

quiring signiﬁcant modiﬁcations to function prop-

erly (Simpson et al., 2004). The forthcoming re-

search on the extension of smart wheelchairs, en-

hanced with path-planning, behavioral learning, and

cognitive capabilities will have a signiﬁcant impact

on the outcome of the mechatronics implementation.

As an example, there is a study to systematically uti-

lize and extend mechatronics-based assistive services,

an emerging ﬁeld devoted to engineering personal de-

vices that enhance the physical, sensory, and cogni-

tive performance of people with disabilities and help

them function more independently in environments

oblivious to their needs (Kawaguchi et al., 2008a;

Kawaguchi et al., 2008b; Kawaguchi and Chan, 2009;

Kawaguchi et al., 2009; Noda et al., 2009). This

ﬁeld lies as a support technology centered on mechan-

ics, electronics, and computing. The mechatronics

support in our vision is meant to emphasize a syn-

ergistic integration of the latest techniques in cross-

disciplinary ﬁelds.

Paratransit is another mode of passenger trans-

portation increasingly offered for handicapped com-

muters and travelers, which in general does not fol-

low ﬁxed routes or schedules, but typically uses vans

or mini-buses for the higher ﬂexibility of picking

up or discharging passengers on request. Many ve-

hicles are specially equipped with wheelchair lifts

or ramps to facilitate access, thus allowing people

with disabilities to have greater employment oppor-

tunities by providing transportation to and from their

workplaces (Simon, 1997). A sub-sector of private

business is on the rise to meet the growing interest

in the paratransit strategy, but the cost for serving

low-density areas and dispersed trip patterns do not

balance with today’s declining ﬁnancial conditions,

which may instead create an urgent need for public

transit operators to maximize all available transporta-

tion resources.

6 CONCLUSIONS

The subject of this paper is a high-level discussion to

address the problem of physical mobility in our so-

ciety in the coming age. The issue has powerful ef-

fects on the living conditions of those with physical

disadvantage who seek to maintain mobility, wish to

continue or broaden community and social activities,

conserve strength and energy, and enhance their gen-

eral quality of life. The community-based approach

outlined here is a basic frameworkto cope with the in-

ﬂux of vulnerable people in mobile wheelchairs. The

concept of information sharing gives the opportunity

to understand and promote any resulting beneﬁts in

broader developmental contexts.

An abundance of information is available and

sharable through the computer medium. The ultimate

goal of our on-going work is to make electric pow-

ered wheelchairs predict and avoid risky situations

and navigate safely through the congested areas and

conﬁned spaces, by exchanging the terrain and loca-

tion information in real-time. To accomplish a more

future oriented view of this class of services, today’s

information systems must be expanded to incorpo-

BUILDING A COMMUNITY INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING DISABLED BUS RIDERS AND LOCAL

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277

rate the community support and to objectively eval-

uate whether or not the public transportation services

ﬁt the user’s needs. The community-based approach

we proposed encompasses these views and shares a

common spirit with the universal design ideal.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is partially supported by the research funds

provided by the New York State Department of Trans-

portation and New York City Environmental Protec-

tion. Our thanks go to City College’s graduate stu-

dents in database classes who have contributed to and

worked on the data population and conceptual study

of this work.

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