COTA Australia welcomes the opportunity to provide comments in response to the Issues Paper on the Review of Disability Standards for Accessible Transport and is grateful that the deadline for submissions has been extended until 31 May.
COTA Australia (COTA) is the national organization of the eight State and Territory COTAs. Around Australia COTAs have a combined individual membership of around 40,000 older people as well as over 1,000 member organisations with a combined membership in excess of 500,000.
Access to public transport is critical to ensuring older people are not socially isolated and able to fully participate in their community. For many older people this becomes more of an issue when they are no longer able to drive their own car. The 2013 COTA ACT survey of older people’s transport issues clearly identifies that there is still a problem with accessibility for older people with mobility issues1 .
This Submission incorporates examples and issues from across the COTAs. Whilst many of them are true only for that jurisdiction, we believe that many are true across all forms of public transport and across all areas and that they show areas for improvement