Agneta Ståhl

Since the mid-1970s I have been doing research at the Department of Traffic Engineering, now the Department of Traffic and Society. Since 1978 my research area has been the special conditions and needs of the elderly and disabled in traffic and the transport system. Since the mid-1980s research on the elderly and disabled has been an autonomous section within the department, for which I have been head of research. In 1996 the importance of research in this field was further underlined when the Committee on Communications Research and the National Road Administration jointly granted funding for an interdisciplinary Competence Centre in the field of Traffic Environment for the Elderly and Disabled, where I am head of research.

During the 25 years and more that I have worked with the field of traffic environment for the elderly and disabled, my research has been broad in scope, covering both safety aspects and traffic planning and organization. The starting point of the research has been the users themselves, their individual conditions and functional capacity. The research elucidates the demands that elderly and disabled people need to have satisfied if the traffic/transport system is to be considered accessible for these groups. My doctoral dissertation from 1986 focused on the social consequences that inadequate access to transport can have for elderly people.

In the field of public transport, my research has a pronounced “whole trip perspective”, which means that information, the walking environment, bus stops, traffic systems, vehicles and service must be included. This research has meant that new forms of traffic and technical solutions have been introduced and tested, usually in close collaboration with the public transport sector and local authorities. During the 1980s I collaborated for ten years with Borås Lokaltrafik and Borås Municipality, when service-route transport was introduced in Sweden, and in the 1990s with Uppsalabuss and Uppsala Municipality, when low-floor buses and other innovations were introduced to this country. The evaluation of the solutions implemented in Borås and Uppsala clearly showed that a public transport system that is planned with a view to the special conditions and needs of the elderly and disabled leads to increased mobility and quality of life for many people. In the latter part of the 1990s I extended my research to include the development of vehicles for public transport and other publicly subsidized transportation (e.g. special transportation services and sick transports). This work has been partly done in the framework of the EU projects MULI-bus and Taxis for All, where I cooperated with Swedish industry. Research in the field of public transport has continued with several projects pursued by doctoral students in the Competence Centre.

Another research area to which I have devoted particular attention is the safety of elderly people in traffic, as both drivers and pedestrians. In the 1980s I began to study elderly drivers’ accidents and their causes. This work began nationally, but soon grew into a Nordic cooperation project and developed in the 1990s to comprise new information technology in vehicles. This research has also continued in projects by doctoral students in the Competence Centre. Elderly pedestrians’ safety risks are and have been another important research area. Elderly people’s fall accidents came into focus early on, resulting in cooperation with a number of municipalities where concrete measures were taken in the walking environment to increase accessibility and safety; these measures have since been evaluated. In the last five years my research has also focused on people with orientation difficulties, especially blind people, and what can be done in the walking environment to increase accessibility and safety for these groups. Research in these fields is currently in progress at the Competence Centre.

During my time as a researcher I had a great deal of international exchange, with assignments for organizations such as the ECMT (European Conference of Ministers of Transport), OECD and NMR (Nordic Council of Ministers), as well as cooperation with consultants and transportation companies in the USA and Canada to implement Swedish traffic concepts such as service-route traffic. I have also taken part in ten or so EU-financed projects, such as EDDIT, which studied elder drivers’ requirements as regards new information technology in vehicles and the benefit of these; SAMPO, where new information technology was used to further develop and increase the efficiency of demand-responsive intermediate forms of public transport; TELSCAN, which drew up guidelines in order to increase knowledge among manufacturers, planners and other researchers about the requirements that elderly and disabled people need to have satisfied when new technology is developed; HOTEL and SIZE, which studied mobility and quality of life issues among older persons in relation to the traffic environment.

Research concerning the elderly and disabled and their relation to the surroundings, in this case the traffic/transport environment, must be pursued on an interdisciplinary basis to shed light on all aspects and be of benefit to society. Cooperation across boundaries and holistic solutions became key words in research early on, and at the end of the 1980s this led to over ten years of cooperation with the Department of Building Function Theory (Professor Owe Åhlund). This involves the integration of housing and transportation for the elderly in joint research projects. The cooperation was extended to include the care of the elderly by working with the Department of Community Medicine in Malmö (Dr Lena Annerstedt). In 1996 the Competence Centre Traffic Environment for Elderly and Disabled was established, with doctoral students from several disciplines – traffic engineering, built environment, human geography, psychology, sociology and occupational therapy. Since the formation of the Competence Centre in 1996 I have had very close and rewarding cooperation with Professor Susanne Iwarsson and her research group at the Department of Health Sciences in the Faculty of Medicine. Today this cooperation is deeply integrated in joint theory and method development, with supervision across the faculty boundaries as a natural part of the work.