Hope Island station opened last Monday. Accessibility was not retrofitted. It was designed in. The final design went through a co-design process with the Cross River Rail Accessibility Reference Group. The ARG brings together people with lived experience across physical, cognitive, sensory, life stage and situational disabilities. Regular meetings. Site visits. Feedback embedded in the design loop from May 2020. The Cross River Rail Delivery Authority says the final design goes above industry best practice guidelines and legislation. That is the language of a project team treating accessibility as a design input, not a compliance task. The Hassell and Cross River Rail team adopted "nothing about us without us" as the consultative approach. That phrase belongs to the disability rights movement. Using it signals the community is a design partner, not a stakeholder to be managed. This is engagement upstream of engineering. Not a tick box for approvals. Not a risk control. A design input that changed the platform interfaces, the wayfinding, the lift placement. For a Gold Coast that is growing fast and preparing to move millions of Brisbane 2032 spectators, that is the right standard. What is your project doing at the design stage? #CommunityEngagement #Infrastructure #Accessibility #CrossRiverRail #InclusiveDesign #GoldCoast — Need clarity on a project? Talk to Anna. Email: hello@evokeadvisory.au Message me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/annacush