The Hidden Costs of Disability ...

£110 for a new battery for the car because the current one had died due to underuse when I went to start the car yesterday. The AA guy took one look at the milometer and asked me if it was worth keeping the car on the road given I'm only doing about 1000miles/.year. I pointed out that as a wheelchair user it's sort of essential to have a car to get anywhere at all.

Which reminds me of the story in yesterday's Observer about cities planning to tax businesses for providing parking for their employees:

Tax on parking: UK cities to impose levy on cars in bid to cut pollution

£550/year seems to be the amount being suggested, which would have cost Evil Aerospace several million per annum for my site alone. The intention seems to be to try to force workers to rely on public transport to get to work. No one seems to have realised (or is it to care?) that this will have an inevitably chilling effect on the employment of disabled people, because the inevitable result will be that many employers will give up on providing car parks entirely, or limit them only to senior managers. Then when a disabled person dependent on their car looks for a job they'll have to write-those employers off as somewhere they just can't get to, or if they've kept a few spaces face arguing that some manager has to give their space up for them, which is sure to be wonderful for their continuing career prospects.

Public transport just can't substitute for people with severe mobility issues. There was a bus-stop at almost the closest point on a public road outside Evil Aerospace, and I would still have had a 600m walk to get to the office. By the end of the working day I was frequently struggling just to get from my desk to my car in the nearest disabled parking bay to the door. And even in a massive car park we actually had fewer disabled bays by the building than disabled drivers in the building. Taxing companies for providing employee parking will end up pushing disabled people out of the workforce.

And a story I'd have seen much sooner if living in a time of plague hadn't pushed my tweetdeck disability columns far to the right of where my screen ends:

https://domesticemployers.org/hand-in-hand-grieves-the-loss-of-engracia-figueroa/

The TLDR is that United Airlines destroyed the powerchair of a disability activist with a custom seating solution, she developed a pressure sore while sitting in an inappropriate 'loaner' chair* for five hours at the airport trying to get them to understand the issue, and three months later she died of complications from that pressure sore. It's basically the nightmare scenario for wheelchair users, and it's precisely the scenario we've been trying to get the airlines to understand for years, that a general loaner chair is not an appropriate or safe solution for someone with specialist seating needs.

* If a picture I came across on line was of the loaner in question, I'm flabbergasted, because it was basically a glorified evac chair, not even a transit chair, and would have been inappropriate for anyone to sit in for more than a few minutes, never mind someone with specialist seating needs.