The Needs and Requirements of People with Disabilities for Frequent Movement in Cities: Insights from Qualitative and Quantitative Data of the TRIPS Project

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

See attachments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Urban Science Reviewer 1: The manuscript “The needs and requirements of people with disabilities for moving in cities more often: Insights from qualitative and quantitative data of the TRIPS project" provides valuable information. However, the article needs to supplement and revise some contents. I suggest you make the following revisions:

1. Introduction and Literature Review

The literature summary related to walkability and other research contents is not

enough, and the summary of technical defects is not systematic enough, which needs

to be supplemented and corrected.

         Authors response: While a systematic review of technical defects is beyond the scope of this paper, we have complemented the literature review with 10 additional references on walkability and accommodation of the needs of persons with disabilities in the SUMPS plans in different European cities as well as their state of implementation.

3.1. Study 1: Interviews on identified barriers.

This part of the content is too detailed, not enough summary. Whether the results can

be classified or presented in the form of graphs is more conducive to readers' understanding.

         Authors response: It is typical and in line of good practice of qualitative research to present in detail in participants’ own words. The point is not to override participants perspective with overlays of researcher interpretations, allowing the readers to assess the interpretability of research. We have signposted this in our methodology section and reference relevant literature on best practice. We would also like to draw the attention of reviewers to short summary paragraphs prior to the presentation of participant quotes framing the presentation of findings for each of the categories.

3.3 Study 3: Proposed Solutions

Part of 3.3 should be moved to the discussion section.

         Authors response: Section 3.3 does not present the researchers’ proposed solutions but rather the design concepts derived through workshops with users (persons with disabilities) and experts. As such, this section presents research findings of our third study, and we believe it should remain in this section. We acknowledge that the subtitle of this sections is however confusing. To avoid such confusion, we have retitled the subsection as “3.3 Study 3: Brainstormed Design Concepts”. We hope this is acceptable.

4. Discussion and Recommendations

Due to the lack of literature comparison in the discussion part, a comparative

discussion should be conducted with the research results of other countries/regions/cities at the level of research methods and results, so as to increase the generalization of the paper.

Authors response: Our paper does claim that presented user insights are generalisable at this stage. This would require a targeted, confirmatory, quantitative research that would build a questionnaire on user insights and would be conducted at an international scale and quite right be compared across countries/regions and cities. As far as we know there are no studies that present qualitative insights by persons with disabilities on walkability, but we are open to suggestions by the reviews or the editorial team.

Reviewer 2 Report

I rate the reviewed article highly. It is important to emphasis the commitment of the Authors to carry out surveys of people with disabilities from different European countries. I know that this is not an easy task, as I have conducted several psychological surveys of vehicle drivers myself. Therefore, I believe that their research and the elaboration of the results obtained should be appreciated. Even though the group of people who took part in the study is not large, I believe that the conclusions developed are relevant and helpful in order to design the transport systems of the cities of the future oriented towards people with disabilities. I have one comment. It concerns the readability of Figure 3. In order to improve its readability, I believe that it could be converted into two separate figures. In my opinion, this would significantly improve the readability of the results presented. If the authors follow my suggestion, I believe that the article should be published immediately in the Urban Science journal.

Author Response

Reviewer 2 Report: I rate the reviewed article highly. It is important to emphasis the commitment of the Authors to carry out surveys of people with disabilities from different European countries. I know that this is not an easy task, as I have conducted several psychological surveys of vehicle drivers myself. Therefore, I believe that their research and the elaboration of the results obtained should be appreciated. Even though the group of people who took part in the study is not large, I believe that the conclusions developed are relevant and helpful in order to design the transport systems of the cities of the future oriented towards people with disabilities. I have one comment. It concerns the readability of Figure 3. In order to improve its readability, I believe that it could be converted into two separate figures. In my opinion, this would significantly improve the readability of the results presented. If the authors follow my suggestion, I believe that the article should be published immediately in the Urban Science journal.

Authors' response: We understand that Figure 3 contains pretty condense information. We have split the table to make it more readable and would suggest its printing in landscape mode if possible to make it more readable to users. We hope this is acceptable.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper presents the main results of a European project related to walkability. The issue is very relevant and the paper is interesting. Some revisions could be provided to increase its readability and quality.

In the following, some broad and specific comments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Urban Science Reviewer 3

The needs and requirements of people with disabilities for moving in cities more often: Insights from qualitative and quantitative data of the TRIPS project Hatzakis et al 2023. The paper presents the main results of an European project related to walkability. The issue is very relevant, and the paper is interesting. Some revisions could be provided in order to increase its readability and quality. In the following, some broad and specific comments.

Broad comments

The paper’s context is related to European rules about urban mobility. The SUMP, recalled in the paper, constitutes one of the main references in this context. However, I suggest the authors to considers:

• Some scientific works that review the implementation of pedestrian mobility inside real and implemented SUMPs
• The connection between SUMP, smart city and Mobility as a Services (MaaS) concepts
• The “European Smart City and Urban Transport”

         Authors response: While a systematic review of the implementation of SUMPS is beyond the scope of this paper, we have complemented the literature review with additional references on SUMPS plans in different European cities as well as their state of implementation and their considerations of the needs of persons with disabilities. While our project (TRIPS) has considered MaaS concepts, including microtransit, robotaxis, bikesharing schemes and the like, we feel such schemes do not relate to the topic of walkability defined as ‘walkability’ is often used to describe the extent to which walking and other non-motorized means of mobility are enabled by the surrounding built environment (Schreuer et al., 2019). As such, we have excluded them from presentation in this paper to maintain a clear focus.

In relation to the proposed method, I suggest the authors to provide more clarifications about the followed steps. Maybe a flow chart could be useful for explaining the framework.

         Authors response: We have added more information about each of the three studies we draw upon and clarify how each of them was conducted within the context of the wider research of the TRIPS project and how they connect with each other. We have not however used a flowchart as it would indicate that they are the sole input for each other, and this is not the case and we deem that this would be misleading for readers.

Finally, maybe for further development of the research, take into account the problems connected to

people mobility in evacuation conditions, due to an imminent disaster event (e.g. Flood). In this case, the current barriers can produce more damages.

         Authors response: Inasmuch as we would have liked to do this research indeed. We have not managed to reach the level of maturity in our research to address this. We agree however with the reviewer that transport and disaster/crisis management research should address such important and imminent issue both for disabled and non-disabled users.

Specific comments

• Please, provide more explanations of figure 2

Authors response: We have split figure 2 to make it more readable, as it was also suggeste by reviewer 2. We hope this is now easier to understand.

2) Please, clarify the survey methods. Do you use online questionnaire? How the questionnaire are

distributed? How do you design the sample?

Authors response: We have added more information about the online survey, questionnaire development, and participant recruitment. We hope this suffices.

3) Maybe, a summary of the representative users recalled inside the text can be useful for the potential

reader (e.g. Sofia 04, wheelchair user). It is important to stress the context where people are moving (city centre?, peripheries?)

         Authors response: Our sample comes from European urban and peri urban environments.

4) Please, provide some quantitative evaluations for supporting the conclusions

         Authors response: In the “Discussion and Recommendations” section we present our insights and reflections on the research rather than conclusions. Our research is qualitative, rather than confirmatory, hence we cannot present solid conclusions. We have made a conscious choice of words in this section to clarify that we make suggestions for further exploration and own interpretations for action conducive to the raised concerns, rather than drawing conclusions to avoid misconceptions. We hope this is acceptable.

Suggested references

Cirianni, F.et al. (2018). A review methodology of sustainable urban mobility plans: Objectives and actions to promote cycling and pedestrian mobility. In Smart and Sustainable Planning for Cities and Regions: Results of SSPCR 2017 2 (pp. 685-697). Springer International Publishing.

Russo, et al (2023). Smart city for sustainable development: Applied processes from SUMP to MaaS at European level. Applied Sciences, 13(3), 1773.

Authors response: We thank you for these suggestions. They have led to the exploration of new research on the topic of SUMPS and their provisions for making public spaces accessible to persons with disabilities.  

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revision of the article is satisfactory.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your review.

We have tried to complemented our literature review and tried to improve the connection of our findings with previous literature to address your suggestions. 

Reviewer 3 Report

The new version improves the paper's quality.

However, some improvements can be implemented. I suggest the authors to underline the engagement of the European Union for facing this issue. 

Possible indications can be reported in this paper  https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39446-1_7

and others reported in the previous review's report  

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you for your review of the new version. We have now referenced suggested literature suggested in both of your reviews and referenced in connection with our discussion section. See highlighted sections in the new uploaded version.