Dr. Maria Chiara Leva:

As we said at the start, the Central Statistics Office issued a report on equality, discrimination and inclusion. The report focused on many different aspects, mainly in the workplace, but public transport was mentioned as an area of interest. This issue has an impact on many aspects of life, such as accessibility. Monetary accessibility is not the same for everyone. When we talk about accessibility, we often think of the structural aspect. In Warsaw, we worked with people working in public transport who went out and audited their own public transport system, with amazing results. Their engagement led to an increase in awareness. I would recommend that for everybody. We all use public transport, or most of us do, but auditing is a different story. That would impact the perception of the priority area and I would recommend that to the committee.

It is important that we acknowledge that the segregation of data has the capacity to show pockets of very vulnerable subgroups in terms of accessibility problems. I am not talking about the visibility issues, which still need to be tackled with regard to basic things like prams and wheelchair users. In the context of an ageing population, the mobility of care is more and more important in caring for the elderly, as well as young children. Time poverty is being stuck in between. There are issues around physical accessibility and monetary accessibility. Members of an ethnic minority might not have the choice of any other modes of transport and it is very important that they get fair access to the one that is available to them.

We have a very good system for senior citizens. Believe it or not, in our survey, the senior citizens were the most satisfied age group in the population. However, younger people were less satisfied, like those between the ages of 35 and 45, as were women in an ethnic minority. There are a variety of reasons for that. Most of them have experienced discrimination on public transport. Most have security concerns and value for money concerns. Some of them have connectivity concerns about the point-to-point travel service they are provided with. Once we get the data, we have to be ready to discover that equality and equity are not quite there yet.