Insight and Know-How

• Bus and Coach.

A charity has called on bus companies to do more to look after visually impaired passengers. Bus companies have been encouraged to provide a better service to blind passengers.

According to charity group Guide Dogs, installing audio-visual equipment on vehicles could be one step in the right direction, as it would help to relay critical information to visually impaired people.

Rail operators already routinely use technology that advises passengers where the train is headed and when their stop is coming up. As a result, Guide Dogs believes that bus companies should follow suit and make use of similar systems. This could complement other technological innovations that are now being widely used by bus operators, such as telematics systems designed to improve fleet management.

David Cowdrey, campaigns manager at Guide Dogs, commented: "We believe it should be easy for everyone to know where they are along a bus route." A poll by the group has found that nearly nine in ten visually impaired people have missed their stop on a bus journey because they could not tell where they were located. This is despite the fact that in many cases, they had already asked the driver of the vehicle to notify them when they arrived at their intended destination.

While many drivers apparently forgot to alert blind passengers, the survey showed that some had refused to tell them when they reached a certain stop. "People are ending up lost or left in potentially dangerous situations because they can't get the information they need about their bus journeys," Mr Cowdrey said. Indeed, he noted that one of the respondents to the survey revealed that she nearly ended up being "locked in a bus in a depot for the night because the driver forgot she was there". This comes shortly after Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, warned that the difficulty of getting information is deterring many blind people from travelling by bus.