High-floor

High-floor designs usually result from packaging requirements: mechanical items such as axles, motors, crankshafts, and/or transmissions, or luggage storage spaces are traditionally placed under the interior floor of these vehicles.

Physically disabled passengers (e.g. those using wheelchairs or who have difficulties climbing stairs) also benefit, as do travelers pulling wheeled luggage or small folding shopping carts.

These problems were a major motivation for the development of low-floor trams, which allow transit operators to avoid the retrofitting of high platforms on existing routes, while still providing improved accessibility.

[4] Today, in Germany, all rapid transit railways, most commuter trains, and many light rail vehicles operate as high-floor networks.

This form of design and construction will avoid the need for subsequent rebuilding of stops on tram routes, even though both cities already have underground lines with high-floor platforms.

Although an early wheelchair-friendly High-floor bus with a low step-entrance, capable of kneeling and having the option of being fitted with a wheelchair ramp for wheelchair access called the Wright Endurance was introduced in 1992, its successor from all of its future bus designs; the low-floor buses were first phased into the UK in 1994, however a large number of step-entrance buses remained in use as well as being manufactured.

Due to the Terms Of The Disability Discrimination Act requiring all buses in public service to be wheelchair accessible, non-compliant step-entrance single deckers and their low floor counterparts were outlawed after 31 December 2015, with non-compliant step-entrance double deckers and their low floor counterparts following suit after 31 December 2016, however exemptions apply for the limited use of non-compliant heritage buses on vintage bus services, as well as Transport For London's Heritage Routemasters due to their service being overlaid on the high-frequency low-floor Route 15.