The Hidden Costs of Disability ...

[davidgillon]

£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.

Comments

[sovay]

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.

That is horrifying. I do not mean that the other news is not destructive and chilling, but directly killing someone has a certain je ne sais FUCK.

[rmc28]

How do we encourage the abled majority onto public transport / bikes / walking and keep the car parking for those who really need it? Do we need to make disability exceptions to the taxation? Is there an existing scheme we could hang that off? Or does it need rethinking from the beginning?

I want to live in a world where most people who can cycle & take public transport do so, but in ways that leave room for cars for people who don't have an alternative.

[el_staplador]

Yes, this is where I'm at (and I'd also like public transport to be much, much more accessible than it currently is).

[davidgillon]

(Excuse the rant, which isn't aimed at you).

This scheme definitely needs rethinking from the beginning, because it clearly didn't think through the effects on disabled people, or worse, did think them through but dismissed them. Unfortunately there's plentiful precedent from other pro-environment campaigns for the latter to be the truth - single use plastic straws most prominently, where the charity that launched the big push against them did involve disabled people from the beginning, but stopped talking to them after they concluded there was no way to eliminate them without discriminating against disabled people. I'm not exaggerating when I say I saw some environmentalists saying on twitter that a few disabled deaths shouldn't be seen as a reason to stop strawban, and scores more refusing to accept the disability issues we raised were real.

With the vsrious pedestrianisation/city-redesign/pro-cycling schemes there's been a clear tendency to co-opt disabled people as a symbol of those their schemes will benefit, without actually bothering to check with us whether they will, and as we tend to be more dependent on cars, not less....

It's IMO clear that there's a systemic problem affecting environmental/green transport campaigners wrt to including disabled views, and I can't help but suspect that in at least some cases its because catering for our needs means many schemes fail in detail even if they sound good at the newspaper headline level. And there are some where you just have to ask 'WTF were they thinking?', such as the international city design consultancy whose index of accessibility uses a toddler to model accessibility, not a wheelchair user. (The obvious difference being that toddlers come with an attached parent to lift them over things/press lift buttons/whatever, while wheelchair users come with attached wheels).

The truth is that it's probably an aspect of the wider failure of abled society to actual engage with disabled people and understand our issues, rather than just presume that they do. But these are groups who would be horrified if they were told they were excluding the views and needs of any other minority groups. Yet somehow disability slips through.

Getting back to the car-parking tax, I don't think it's salvageable from the disability employment side of things, because it's core mechanism is inimical to disabled access. I'm not a fan of it from the non-disabled side of things either, because it's inevitably going to be a mechanism that causes more problems for those at the bottom of the employment stack than the top - either management will pass on the costs, which will affect the low-paid more, or they'll dump their car parks for the lower-paid while keeping them for management, or if they dump them entirely they can always call an Uber, which isn't an option for someone on minimum wage with a long commute. And inevitably it'll be a problem for those who work in town but live in rural areas poorly served by public transport.

Weaning people away from cars has to be a process of encouragement, this one is a process of hitting them with a blunt stick. We can't simply ban works car parking (and for many firms this will amount to a ban) without first putting in place the public transport network to serve people as a substitute.

[rmc28]

Thank you, I appreciate the content of the rant!

Useful to know too about the overlaps in unfairness (disability & poverty). Intersectional or bullshit just keeps on being true, yes?

[davidgillon]

Intersectional or bullshit just keeps on being true, yes?

And people who protest that they wouldn't dream of doing it keep on doing it. *headdesk* *le sigh*.


Actually, I wonder if that's part of the problem - they wouldn't dream of discriminating, therefore if they're doing something they don't need to worry about whether they might be doing something that discriminates, so therefore they don't need to check with actual minority groups.

[hilarita]

Yes - any scheme like this car parking one can *only* come once you've got a high quality affordable public transit system, great bike lanes (that can accommodate long bikes, wide bikes etc), bike parking (including parking for cargo bikes, three-wheelers etc.). At that point you can be pissed off that there's a big company with acres of tarmac used to park executives' ridiculous cars, and you can consider what to do to make them bloody stop, while ensuring there's plenty of disabled parking close to the building.*

* Of course, increased hybrid and remote working can also really help here, but employers are of course all stone cold bastards who will disobey the law at the slightest provocation.**

** Provocation == disabled people exist and have vaguely indicated they'd like to work at the company/org.

[davidgillon]

I noticed when I went to pick up a prescription today that Chatham has acquired a "bike hub" in the Wickes car park - iow a big bike shed. Well placed for the commuters at two minutes from the station, a ten minute walk up a big hill if you're coming back from shopping in the town centre.I suppose you could get on a bus instead, but if you need a bus to get to the bike park, then why not just take the bus all the way

There's also a tension between bike lanes and disabled access that popped up repeatedly in the covid-related expansions. The in-the-street-but-protected-by-kerbs ones both restrict the ability of disabled people to cross the road and obstruct the ability of accessible taxis to put down their ramps so wheelchair users can get in/out, the on-the-footpath ones were repeatedly routed straight through the places disabled people were expected to wait, as indicated by dropped kerbs and/or textured paving at bus stops etc. (Also repeatedly seen, temporary tarmac ramps onto expanded footpaths that had room for a wheelchair at one end, but not the other).