Overview
The London Borough of Camden has worked in partnership with Camden Community Transport over a number of years to enhance the accessibility of people who otherwise have great difficulty getting to places of employment, education, health services or social activities. The Council has also developed a wide range of environmental transport policies which promote less polluting public transport without compromising accessibility. The ASTI project looks to provide accessible door-to-door minibus transport with low- or non-polluting vehicles, without reducing the effectiveness of conventional fleets.
The ASTI project aims to demonstrate practical approaches to reducing the adverse environmental effects of local accessible transport. The project covered the following issues: the integration of the transport management of community, health and municipal vehicle operation; the development of gas and electric accessible minibuses for the sick, the elderly and the disabled; the improvement of vehicle technology for despatching and monitoring across fleets, organisations and users.
The tasks covered are as follows:
- the construction of low pollution accessible minibuses;
- the creation and testing of an accessible and more sustainable network of minibus transport into which several local agencies (health, social services, community organisation etc) could link;
- the development of computer aided multi-service despatching and scheduling between relevant agencies to minimise resource use (with resultant benefits), while meeting the accessibility needs of the sick, the disabled and elderly persons.