EURO ACCESS Project

The Euro Access project aims to raise awareness about the transport needs of disabled people and best practices in the EU countries and two EFTA countries, allowing all countries to learn from the best practices. A transferability analysis is used to identify how best to disseminate and apply the results, both at political level and operational level.

Euro Access will :

• provide an inventory of the legislation in the EU member countries and two EFTA countries. This will facilitate the development of a common EU approach to the issue and serve as guidelines for countries in the process of developing such legislation.
• through the collection of best practices and legislation promote the development of comparable information and statistics basis at the level of the 27 members’ states. This comparable information and statistics will be of primary importance to enable the EU to give priority to this area.
• raise awareness of user needs and expectations for an accessible public transport system for people with disabilities. This will be a fundamental point if EU policy wants to be human-right based and to enhance the opportunities for education, training, lifelong learning and employment for the people with disabilities.
• raise awareness of best practices in relation to accessibility to the public transport system for people with disabilities and as a tool to create equal opportunities for people with disabilities.

The Euro Access project is organised in three stages

1. Collection of data
During this first stage, the Euro Access partners will collect all the information relevant to the project. National legislation (where it exists) will be reviewed as well as national transport regulations and best practice regarding accessibility of public transport for people with disabilities.. This stage will cover public transport systems in both an urban and a rural context. Euro Access will be limited to land transport.

2. Analysis of the data
At this stage, the data collected will be organised in order to allow comparison between countries.

3. Recommendation stage
The design of policy recommendations will be done as a third stage as well as the dissemination of the project’s results.

EURO ACCESS is supported by funding under the Sixth Research Framework Programme of the European Commission.

Download the project leaflet in English in PDF format from the right-hand panel.
(Other language versions are available from the project website).