Step-free access

Step-free means what it says: a route with no step anywhere along it. The important word is route. Access starts at the pavement outside, or at the platform of the station you arrive at, and it does not stop at the front door. A building with level entry, a stepped lobby and a lift reached by two risers is not step-free. Neither is a museum whose nearest step-free station sits a kilometre away behind a stepped subway. We record the whole chain, because a traveller has to travel all of it.

“Accessible” and “step-free” are not synonyms, although venues use them as if they were. Accessible is a label a building applies to itself, and it can legitimately mean that staff will lift a chair up two steps. Step-free is a physical description you can falsify with a tape measure. Our protocol treats an entrance as step-free when nothing on the route rises more than 15 mm and no lip can catch a small front castor. A portable ramp fetched by staff on request is recorded separately as assisted access, because it depends on somebody being on shift.

Rail is where the phrase gets slippery. Most operators publish step-free as a property of the station, meaning lifts or ramps from street to platform. That is half the journey. Between the platform edge and the train floor there is usually both a vertical step and a horizontal gap, and on older metro lines that step commonly runs from about 5 to 20 cm. Some networks describe a station as step-free while still expecting you to use a boarding ramp deployed by staff. Read the wording closely: street to platform and street to seat are different promises.

A 5 cm step sounds trivial to anyone who has never pushed a wheelchair. It is not. Front castors on a manual chair are usually 10-20 cm across, and they stop dead against a vertical face at roughly a third of their diameter. Clearing one means a controlled backward tip, which needs upper-body strength, a companion, or both, and it is genuinely unsafe on a wet or sloping surface. Powerchairs, heavy and running small front wheels, do worse. A single step is not a mild version of a staircase. It is a closed door.

Treat every claim of step-free access as a claim about one specific route on one specific date. Ask which entrance, whether the lift reaches the floor you need, whether the accessible toilet is on that floor, and what happens when the lift is out of service. Lift outages get announced on the morning and are the most common reason a planned step-free journey falls apart. Where a figure on this site is compiled from a venue’s own statement rather than measured on the ground, the profile says so before it says anything else.