Part 1: What We Want to Achieve

Vision

Our vision is that:

"All disabled people can travel with the same freedom, choice, dignity and opportunity as other citizens."

The vision states in a sentence what disabled people, transport operators and providers and local and central government want to achieve for Scotland.

It is influenced by the Shared Vision for Independent Living in Scotland^[1] and also the notion of citizenship: a fair society where all of its members treat each other with respect and as equal citizens, where everyone is socially valued as having equal worth, celebrated for their diversity and able to participate in society.

During our engagement process, some people argued that the vision should be for everyone and not specifically mention disabled people. However, the majority of views recognised that there were specific barriers to be removed to make travel more accessible for disabled people. In doing this, travel would be more accessible for all.

Outcomes

The vision is supported by four outcomes. These reflect the results the partners described above want to see:

Outcome 1: more disabled people make successful door-to-door journeys, more often.

This outcome is about helping all disabled people use the transport system in its broadest sense, when they want and as often as they want to.

Outcome 2: disabled people are more involved in the design, development and improvement of transport policies, services and infrastructure.

This outcome is about the rights of disabled people to be, and the necessity of disabled people being, involved in all aspects of transport to help show what works for them.

Outcome 3: everyone involved in delivering transport information, services and infrastructure will help to enable disabled people to travel.

This outcome is about the importance of ensuring people working at all levels of the transport system can understand the needs and wishes of different people with different support needs.

This includes needs arising from mobility, sensory and cognitive impairments, mental health problems and other often hidden disabilities.

Outcome 4: disabled people feel comfortable and safe using public transport – this includes being free from hate crime, bullying and harassment when travelling.

This outcome is about the experiences of disabled people during journeys – making sure people don't feel anxious, confused or worried, and that disabled people aren't subject to abuse or mistreatment, including hate crime.

Delivery of vision and outcomes

All of the work of everyone involved in transport at every level, should be aimed at helping to achieve our vision and outcomes for accessible travel. The work to implement this Framework will help to make sure that this happens.

To ensure we can measure progress, we worked with people in government and transport to find out the things already being measured. These things will give us an indication of whether we are achieving our outcomes.

We found that there were some gaps in these measurement tools. So throughout the lifespan of this Framework we will be looking at what other things we can do to find out if our outcomes are being achieved. This includes our asking disabled people directly if things are improving: more about how we are going to do that is given in Part 6 of this document.

Appendix 1 shows each of the outcomes together with the initial set of measurements that will indicate if they are being achieved.