Does bus boarding disable young people?

Everyday life involves an abundance of services and journeys that change alongside individual circumstances. For example, most children visit educational establishments to learn, and in adulthood travel to workplaces to earn. Travel distance and route complexity from home to required destinations can be diverse, making some places easier to access than others. Some destinations are accessed by fewer people, such as health settings, social services, youth justice teams, special schools and other places. Yet significant variance in institutional locations, practices, and accessibility support can make journey problems difficult to understand [i] [ii] [iii]. UK Disability History Month 2023, running from 16th November to 16th December, focuses on children and young people’s experiences of disablement: ‘so that all children and young people with long term impairment will not experience the social exclusion of stigma, stereotypes, negative attitudes and socially created barriers in the environment and the way things are organised’ [iv]. For young people in particular, service access includes a further layer of complexity as the transition from dependent to independent travel usually involves fewer lifts, less chaperoning or money, and accessing new destinations like college or training [v] [vi].