Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Companion requirements
  3. Wheelchairs
  4. Assistance Requirements

Introduction

Persons with reduced mobility (PRMs) and people with other accessibility requirements are an important customer base for the sale of public transport tickets.

Furthermore, there are multiple laws and EU regulations covering these requirements. Many of these laws are national laws and the regulations are not internationally aligned. In most countries, however, a ‘disability card’ is given to PRMs. With this card the PRMs can prove their status. The card typically defines which specific rights a PRM has as a traveler.

Regarding transport by rail, the major requirements are within these subject areas:

  • persons who need a permanent companion
  • the necessity to transport a person with a wheelchair
  • assistance requirements, especially for loading and unloading a wheelchair to and from a vehicle
  • trip search adjustments, e.g. ‘no step’ at stations or increased walk time

These requirements and their relationship to the OSDM standard are covered in this document.

Companion requirements

If a permanent companion is required for a person with disabilities, the person is given a disability card with a specific mark in order to prove this requirement. Usually, the companion travels for free or for an extremely reduced price.

These rights are subject to national laws and carrier specific tariff regulations.

In OSDM, the right to have a companion under PRM rules is specified in the offer search (POST /offers) by specifying the value COMPANION in AnonymousPassengerSpecification.prmNeeds.

This value should be specified at the entry for the PRM. In most cases it is required that, if the party consists of the PRM and multiple companions, the price is reduced for the ‘most expensive’ traveler accompanying the PRM.

If the offer request is successfully handled, one of the passengers besides the PRM will become the companion and will be marked accordingly in the offer response.

Wheelchairs

Seats for wheelchair users have specific properties:

  • space to store the wheelchair while traveling
  • close to accessible toilet
  • easier access to these seats, e.g. wider doors or aisles

Therefore, there is a limited number of wheelchair places available on typical long distance trains. To manage these places, wheelchair requirements must be specified when requesting an offer by specifying the value WHEELCHAIR in AnonymousPassengerSpecification.prmNeeds.

The provider system should, if this is specified, request the seats appropriate for the wheelchair users from the seat inventory. If no more appropriate seats are available on a given trip or section, no offer should be returned.

In a multi-person offer request, the value COMPANION_SEAT in AnonymousPassengerSpecification.prmNeeds can be used to specify who will be assigned the seat beside the wheelchair seat. It is not appropriate to use this value when no person with prmNeeds = WHEELCHAIR is included in the party for which the offer is requested.

Assistance requirements

The type of assistance which is required in almost all cases is help to load or unload a wheelchair and the passenger to and from the vehicle.

Some vehicles are low-floor, but in many cases either vehicle-based or station-based loading equipment will be needed.

The station-based assistance is typically not provided by the carrier (‘Railway undertaking’) but by the infrastructure provider. Furthermore, requesting this assistance is a manual process in many cases and not automated or connected to the selling system.

If the manual booking of assistance fails, it should be possible to cancel the booking by providing the value PRM_SUPPORT_UNAVAILABLE as overruleCode in a refundOffer request.

Trip search extensions

PRMs typically cannot use stairs to reach a platform. This means that for a trip to be accessible for PRMs, the way to the platform at the originating station, the way between platform at any changes and the way from the platform at the terminating stations must be navigatable without the use of stairs.

Visually impaired people may need specific aids (e.g. braille symbols on handrails) in order to navigate the station.

To specify these requirements to the trip search engine, the policy filter of the trip parameters (TripSearchCriteria.parameters.policyFilter) needs to have the appropriate flags set:

  • noSingleStep for wheelchair users who cannot use stairs
  • noSight for visually impaired passengers

The use of these attributes requires the relevant timetable data to be available to the underlying journey planner. This may or may not be the case and should be clearly indicated by the party providing the journey planner.

In order to support travelers which need more time to transfer between trains, other attributes can be used, which reside in TripSearchCriteria.parameters.mobilityFilter:

  • walkSpeed (as a percentage, with the default of 100 indicating ‘average’ speed) can be set to a value lower than 100
  • additionalTransferTime and minimalTransferTime are time values (specified as durations)