Abstract
Age-friendly transportation design is an important factor in fostering mobility for older adults. Mobility is associated with older adults’ lifestyle, wellbeing and quality of life. The government of Malaysia is dedicated to developing an age-friendly city to address the rapid expansion of the ageing population. Sunway City is a township in Malaysia, seamlessly linking public transport such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), free shuttle buses and elevated canopy walk. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the design of transportation in Sunway City to achieve the aspiration of an age-friendly city. Focus groups and individual interviews were conducted to examine the attitudes and experiences towards different transportation modes in Sunway City, in which 32 older adults were interviewed. It was found that the transportation design did not fully meet the criteria of age-friendly transportation suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO) because the physical design did not adequately address the needs of older people with physical and cognitive impairments. Education on respecting older adults should be enhanced among young adults for the purpose of creating an age-friendly community. The findings provide insights for Malaysian authorities to optimise the transportation systems and services in future.
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Acknowledgement
This project was supported by Monash University Malaysia (Grant Code: SCG-2018–02-SCI) and a grant of Project of Strategic Importance of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (project no 1-ZE2Q).
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Wong, K.P., Teh, PL., Qin, J. (2023). Tinkering in Sunway City: Sustainable Transportation and Mobility for Older Dwellers. In: Rau, PL.P. (eds) Cross-Cultural Design. HCII 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14022. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35936-1_31
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