Beyond Compliant Stations: Why Disability Access Laws Need To Evolve

Key Takeaways

• Many jurisdictions have implemented laws to ensure equal access to public transport for people with disabilities.
• These laws initially produced significant gains in access at a relatively low cost.
• However, once the low-hanging fruit for access has been picked, it becomes very expensive to retrofit stations.
• This money would be better spent on improving access to transport by enhancing active transport options, allowing people with disabilities to access local amenities, including public transport.
• This change would also improve access for people without disabilities as well as help deliver net zero targets and reduce congestion.
• It is time for the disabled access standards to be amended to consider transport holistically, not just in the realm of public transport.

What Next?

Could you be spending your money in better ways to support people with disabilities with their transport needs? Should you be considering amendments to transport equality standards?

Introduction

Picture this: a transport agency spends $200 million retrofitting a train station to meet disability access standards. The project helps 100 people with disabilities per week. Meanwhile, just down the road, hundreds of people with disabilities cannot easily access public transport, not because the stations aren't compliant with the standards, but because they can't safely walk, wheel, or cycle to reach them in the first place.

This isn't a hypothetical scenario. It's playing out in cities across the world where well-meaning accessibility laws are creating a costly paradox: we're perfecting access to transport infrastructure that many people with disabilities still can't easily reach.

Significant Progress

For over two decades, jurisdictions have implemented robust disability access standards for public transport. In Australia, the Disability Standards for Accessible Public Transport 2002, which supports the Disability Discrimination Act 1992, mandates that public transport infrastructure must be equally accessible to people with and without disabilities. Similar laws exist worldwide, and they've achieved remarkable initial success.

But these laws may now be doing more harm than good for the very people they were designed to help.

The early wins were genuine and important. Installing ramps, improving signage, and adding accessible toilets delivered significant improvements at relatively modest cost. But as the low-hanging fruit disappears, we're left with a system that demands ever more expensive retrofits while ignoring the broader transport system that determines whether people with disabilities can actually equally participate in their communities.

What will deliver the best outcomes moving forward?

What if the money we're spending on making individual stations compliant would deliver better outcomes for people with disabilities if invested in the active transport networks that connect them to those stations? What if our narrow focus on public transport accessibility is actually making overall accessibility worse?

These aren't comfortable questions, but they're necessary ones. As our populations age and the number of people living with disabilities grows, we need transport policies that deliver real-world access, not just regulatory compliance.

Current standards treat each piece of transport infrastructure in isolation, demanding compliance regardless of broader network effects. A train station must be accessible even if the surrounding streets to access the station are impassable for wheelchair users. A local bus must meet standards even if there's no safe path to reach the bus stop to access it.

This siloed approach made sense when the focus was on removing the most obvious barriers. But it's become counterproductive as we tackle more complex accessibility challenges. We're now spending enormous sums to perfect individual nodes in a transport network while ignoring the connections that determine whether people can actually use the system.

The unintended consequence is stark: Rigid adherence to accessibility standards is now hindering more effective accessibility investments. The very laws designed to help people with disabilities are constraining our ability to help them.

Shouldn’t we do both?

Critics might argue that this presents a false choice, that transport agencies have diverse funding streams and can pursue both station retrofits and active transport improvements simultaneously. This misses the fundamental reality of public sector budgeting: every dollar spent on compliance is a dollar not spent on alternatives. Transport agencies operate within finite capital budgets, and their planning processes are built around prioritising competing projects. When disability standards mandate specific investments, they necessarily crowd out other improvements that might deliver better outcomes.

Others might contend that the real problem lies in our transport spending priorities, that we lavish billions on car infrastructure while starving public and active transport of resources. There's considerable merit to this argument. But even if we dramatically rebalanced transport funding toward sustainable modes, the resource constraint would remain. The demand for improvements will always outstrip available funding, particularly as we face the urgent need to decarbonise transport systems and tackle congestion. In this environment, mandating expensive compliance projects that help relatively few people becomes increasingly difficult to justify when alternative investments could help many more.

Changing the Law

If the law is delivering outcomes that are making things worse for people with disabilities compared to alternatives, it needs to be amended. Instead of focusing solely on public transport, it should adopt a more holistic approach to transport needs, which includes active transport and supports people with disabilities in accessing their local amenities, such as bus stops and stations, as well as shops, libraries, and parks.

Of course, improving active transport links would also provide other significant benefits, including access for people without disabilities, reduced carbon emissions, less congestion and better health outcomes.

Conclusion

The current approach to disability access in transport, while well-intentioned, has become a victim of its own success. After picking the low-hanging fruit of basic accessibility improvements, we now face a system that prioritises expensive retrofitting over practical solutions that could help more people with disabilities.

The irony is stark: we're spending hundreds of millions to make individual stations compliant while people with disabilities remain unable to reach those very stations because of poor active transport links. This isn't just inefficient, it's actively harmful to the people these laws were designed to help.

The solution isn't to abandon accessibility standards, but to evolve them. We need laws that take a holistic view of transport accessibility, recognising that a perfectly compliant station is meaningless if it's unreachable. By shifting focus toward comprehensive active transport networks that connect people with disabilities to their local amenities, including public transport hubs, we can deliver better outcomes for everyone.

As our populations age and the number of people living with disabilities grows, this reform becomes even more urgent. We can continue down a path of diminishing returns, or we can embrace a more thoughtful approach that puts practical accessibility ahead of bureaucratic compliance.

The question isn't whether we should support people with disabilities, of course we should. The question is whether we're brave enough to admit when our current approach isn't working and smart enough to find a better way forward.