Assessment of the barrier-free rollability of road surfaces in Vienna

While large joint widths for pavements are desirable from the perspective of drainage, they are undesirable from the perspective of walking comfort and wheelchair accessibility (Grimm 2018). In the course of a master's thesis written at the Institute of Transport, the topic of barrier-free use of of road surfaces was investigated in terms of good rollability with wheelchairs (Aigner 2020). A new measurement method was developed and tested for this purpose. The basic hypothesis of the method is that there is a correlation between the objectively measurable physical quantity of acceleration and the resulting jerk on the one hand and the subjective perception of wheelchair users on the other. To test the hypothesis, a wheelchair was equipped with a mobile phone as an accelerometer. The wheelchair equipped in this way was driven over 14 different street surfaces in the city centre of Vienna and the accelerations were measured. Eleven people who are dependent on a wheelchair in everyday life drove on nine of these surfaces and evaluated their barrier-free rollability. Despite the relatively small sample, it can be assumed that the presumed correlation between physical measured variables and subjective perception exists. Accordingly, the accelerometer is a suitable method for assessing the accessibility of surfaces in public spaces. The study pursues several objectives. Firstly, the test method developed in (Aigner 2020) is to be validated in more detail and checked with regard to its possible applications in practice (WP1, WP3). Among other things, the influence of the wheelchair type and the steering wheels, which was largely excluded in (Aigner 2020), will be investigated. Based on this, a criterion for barrier-free rollability is to be derived with the help of extensive measurement tours (WP2) as a function of joint width, slab size and evenness. Finally, paving materials commonly used in Vienna will be evaluated with regard to infiltration and barrier-free rollability with the help of this criterion (WP4).