Mall Mobility
Published: 12 May, 2011
There are approximately 10 million disabled people in Great Britain covered by the Disability Discrimination Act, representing around 18 per cent of the population. The estimated annual purchasing power of people with disabilities is £80 billion.
For many with permanent or temporary mobility problems getting out and about can be a difficult and frustrating experience with many shopping centres, high streets and leisure destinations lacking the mobility equipment needed to make a visit easier and more pleasurable - something due to get worse with cuts to shopmobility schemes expected.
Fraser Sinnott is director of Mall Mobility, a new initiative which he hopes will allow shopping centres and other public places to offer a shopmobility service even if subsidy isn’t available.
The idea is that a shopping centre would have a docking station installed, preferably at the entrance nearest the disabled parking bays, holding four coin-operated scooters. Users could then hire a scooter and use it for as long as they like for a flat charge of £3 - paying £5 initially and getting a £2 deposit back once they’ve returned the vehicle to the docking station.
Comfort Mobility, the parent company of Mall Mobility, have been running shopmobility schemes in shopping centres for a number of years.
“A lot of shopping centres can’t afford to have mobility equipment set up to help the disabled get round all parts of the centre and to allow them to stay for longer,” says Sinnott.
“Shopmobility schemes were always heavily subsidised either by the shopping centre or the local council to cover the cost of the scooters and staff. It was almost impossible to make profit so we thought about making mobility equipment available in shopping centres that couldn’t afford to subsidise.
“The whole idea of this is that you don’t need to have extra staff on hand, as with other shopmobility schemes.”
Sinnott flirted with the idea before deciding to focus on it last year. Now, the final prototype is in production and will be installed at Clydebank shopping centre in the coming weeks.
Clydebank was the first shopping centre Sinnott approached. “They were really delighted – they loved it,” he says. “They’ve been trying to find a way to get shopmobility into the malls for 10 years but they couldn’t get the funding so they gave us the go-ahead immediately – it wasn’t a hard sell.”
If budget allows, centre management may choose to buy the equipment outright. £15,000 pays for four scooters and a docking station, set-up and a year’s maintenance contract.
It is also possible to use the scooters and the docking station for advertising purposes. Fraser expects the majority of the bookings to be from retailers within the centre wishing to advertise their location within the mall.
The docking station takes up a square meter of space and can be wall mounted if necessary and the scooters are just over a meter long and travel at two miles an hour with an automatic breaking system. “If the user let’s go of the throttle, it stops,” explains Sinnott. “It’s very much a touch and go thing.”
“Mall Mobility allows the shopping centre to attract new customers and enables their disabled visitors to spend more time shopping,” says Sinnott. “The advantages for the customer is that it gives them a whole new sense of freedom to visit shopping centres and other leisure destinations that they wouldn’t have been able to previously.”
Eventually, Sinnott hopes to have a unit in every shopping centre in the country.
“The idea is to encourage people to get out and about, visit more places and do more leisure activities rather than being stuck at home.”
For more information on Mall Mobility, contact admin@mall-mobility.co.uk or call 0141 641 9404.
