Disability, Transportation, Activity Performance, and Neighborhood Features in California: Conducting a Focus Group and Designing a Survey

People with disabilities often encounter more and different problems with transportation compared to their socioeconomic peers without disabilities, but their desires for transportation mode choices, usage frequencies, activity frequencies, and neighborhood features have been poorly understood. The authors have begun to rectify those deficiencies with this study, developed in close cooperation with disability advocacy organizations (DAOs). The authors conducted a focus group in 2021 November involving 20 adults with various disabilities across California, including rural, suburban, and urban parts of the major coastal metropolitan areas as well as areas in the interior of the state. Focus group participants’ comments evinced a broad theme of problems for people with disabilities arising from car-oriented land use patterns, as they asked for more street lighting, seating, and shade, more frequent public transit service with more geographic coverage, and similar support for infrequent yet critical longer-distance trips. Based on focus group participants’ suggestions and pre-testing as well as feedback from DAOs, the authors developed a survey of adults across California to capture how disability affects the choices and desires that people make for transportation mode frequencies, activity frequencies, and neighborhood features. The survey collected nearly 2,000 cleaned responses, reflecting the diversity in disability, geography, and socioeconomic conditions in California.