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CORVALLIS - Oregon State University will use a new $5 million grant from the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research to create the nation's first research center focused on making inter-city transportation more accessible.

The funding from this agency of the U.S. Department of Education will establish at OSU the National Center for Accessible Transportation (NCAT), with a goal of making travel easier for the 10 percent of the population made up of people with disabilities.

The center will be a partnership between faculty and students in the OSU College of Engineering and the OSU College Health and Human Sciences, and involve researchers at Oregon Health and Sciences University and the Stanford Transportation Group, a provider of business-oriented consulting and research to aircraft manufacturers.

"This is an outstanding example of what happens when researchers collaborate across disciplines," said Katharine Hunter-Zaworski, a rehabilitation and transportation engineer in the OSU College of Engineering and director of the new research center. "This project involves engineers working together with researchers in public health, sports science, statistics, industrial design, and other fields.

"And the end result is that the quality of life for many people will be dramatically improved."

Anyone who's traveled in an airliner or on long-distance buses or trains knows how challenging it can be to navigate the narrow aisles, tightly spaced seats, and cramped restrooms, Hunter-Zaworski said. For people with disabilities, these confined spaces present hurdles that can be daunting and humiliating, and often limit where a person can travel.

The timing for such a research center is overdue, Hunter-Zaworski says. The U.S. population is aging, air travel is expanding, and airline companies are employing greater numbers of smaller regional aircraft with 60-75 seats, which enable airlines to service a wider geographical area, but present challenges to persons with disabilities.

"Up to half of the persons with disabilities who could travel do not, primarily because of accessibility issues," Hunter-Zaworski said. "And more than half of the destinations served by public transportation are served by the least accessible modes - regional aircraft, rail and inter-city buses. It's very important to me that transportation be barrier-free."

Hunter-Zaworski is a leading international authority on accessibility issues and was instrumental in the barrier-free design of SKYTRAIN, the advanced transit system in Vancouver, B.C. She says that locating the new center in the heart of the Pacific Northwest is ideal.

"The Eugene and Portland airports are the most progressive in the nation when it comes to accessibility for persons with disabilities," she said. "Now we have the opportunity to take what we have in terms of accessibility in this very open, active region, improve it through research, and make accessibility much better nationwide.

"If persons with disabilities are to participate fully in those aspects of life that involve travel - work, vacations, family emergencies, job interviews, education, etc., then the accessibility problems of public transportation must be addressed worldwide with an aggressive research and development program like this one."

Research at the new center will focus on two major areas: the biomechanics of wheelchair transfers in confined spaces; and the perceptions, reactions and attitudes of people toward existing and proposed accessibility solutions.

The biomechanics research will employ a sophisticated six-camera motion tracking system in conjunction with force plates to determine the motions and forces involved in dependent and independent transfers in confined spaces such as aircraft aisles. The survey-based research will study six groups that are directly involved with accessibility issues: travelers with disabilities, non-travelers with disabilities, employees of airlines and airports, bus operators and manufacturers, aircraft manufacturers, and rail operators.

Joe Zaworski, Hunter-Zaworski's husband, co-investigator on the project and an OSU engineering professor, says that the research at the new center will help lead to legislative changes that mandate accessibility and ultimately benefit everyone.

"We're not using this grant to construct a building," he said. "All the funding will be used for research, and the research results will benefit people without disabilities as well. When you improve things for persons with disabilities, you ultimately improve things for the general public, too."

The project has been endorsed by industry and other organizations, including Boeing, Easter Seals, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, Horizon Air, Amtrak, Southwest Airlines, and others.

"The airlines are very enthusiastic and supportive," Hunter-Zaworski said. "This is a huge opportunity to improve accessibility in a wide range of transportation. Other academic researchers involved in the project include Jeffrey McCubbin, Mike Pavol, and Virginia Lesser from OSU, Laurie Powers and Charles Drum from Oregon Health and Sciences University, Uwe Rutenberg from Canada's International Centre for Accessible Transportation, and Gerald Bernstein from the Stanford Transportation Group.

For more information, visit the OSU College of Engineering at http://engr.oregonstate.edu, and the OSU College of Health and Human Sciences at http://hhs.oregonstate.edu.