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Healthy Aging and Public Transportation

The Community Development Department recently partnered with the Cambridge Council on Aging, Kittelson and Associates, Inc., and the Institute of Human Centered Design to explore usability, accessibility, and safety for seniors using public transit.  

This project has been completed. No further updates to this project page will be made.


Healthy Aging and Public Transportation, Kittelson & Associates, Inc.

Partnering with the Council on Aging, the Community Development Department conducted a series of community meetings with seniors focusing on “usability, mobility, and accessibility” to transit. The goal of each meeting was to engage seniors in a discussion about their experiences with public transit, including challenges, barriers, and opportunities. Meeting facilitators recorded notes detailing the comments and generated a catalogue of transit and transit access issues for the City’s review and consideration. Following the meetings, the issues were organized into categories and, where possible, projects were identified.

User/Expert Field Analysis of Public Transit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Institute of Human Centered Design

IHCD’s team of designers met with ten seniors to conduct reviews of the major T stations and bus lines in Cambridge. Each senior was taken through one of three “trips” that had been created by IHCD based on data collected by the City of Cambridge. Each trip took two hours and was defined by a series of four actions that occurred several times in each trip: arrival at the bus or T station, waiting inside the bus stop or T station, boarding, and finally getting off of the bus or train. IHCD evaluated and broke its findings into five environments: the physical, informational, communication, attitudinal, and policy environments.

For more information, contact Bill Deignan at wdeignan@cambridgema.gov or 617/349-4632.