Never Walked In High Heels

I’m in Central London trying to get the 188 home. A driver pulls up to the stop looks at me and insists that London buses don’t have wheelchair ramps. Now in a lot of ways, I can’t say I really blame him for being a fool, just like I can’t be blamed for being born with a disability. He doesn’t know that I have lived in London for years. He doesn’t know that I’ve used 3 buses today, all of which had wheelchair ramps. He probably doesn’t even know that one entire side of his double-decker bus is devoted to a full color ad declaring all buses in London to now be wheelchair accessible. And I’m assuming that he has no idea that I work for Transport for London and I just met his supervisor last week. All he knows is that he is one hundred percent right and I have a disability, which makes me automatically one hundred percent wrong.

Like I said, people shouldn’t blamed for how they are naturally.

Except it is this exact excuse which keeps London miserably inaccessible to wheelchair users and woefully under prepared for the Olympics / Paralympics in 2012. Yes, the London Underground was started in 1863. Yes, London is a city where things are so old that every piece of construction could qualify for a blue historical plaque. Yes, the city is hard for anyone to get around in. None of this justifies the fact that we are now five years after Britain passed the Disability Discrimination Act and there is still not a single reliable form of transportation in London for disabled people to use. As a transportation advisor, I’ve heard public officials try to justify these conditions over and over. And you know what, after all this time and all the warning, after America passed its disability legislature a full fifteen years before Britain passed it, there is still no good way for person’s who have anything less than a fully functioning body to get around in London.

An athlete in the Paralympics stands to be insulted by the ground staff at any London airport. They would be appalled to learn just how many taxi drivers don’t know how to use their own ramps, and how many bus drivers deny that ramps even exist. And, my guess is, after a day or so, they would consider themselves lucky to even get on a train with the level of resentment I’ve seen from most station staff. And the London Underground has a goal of making thirty three percent of all stations on the system accessible by 2013… that’s it, just one third. These are the situations I see in London on a daily basis. In one of the world’s most diverse cities, access is far from being even “manageable.”

When determining nation wide access, the concrete obstacles are often easiest to change. The mental blocks that people throw up are always inhibit equality more than issues of bricks and mortar. Now my worry is that people are falling for ‘good enough,’ and the idea that London was never made to be accessible. Maybe if you have the luxury of taking this attitude London’s accessibility today seems impressive. But to those of us who are dependent on accessible transit, these conditions are paltry to say the least.

People of London you have just under three years to inform, change, and build. The first thing you must do is stop hiding behind your “nature” however justifiable of an excuse it may provide. Since when has something right ever been easy? I don’t think with this little time left Londoners can accomplish the necessary adjustments to make this city wheelchair friendly. Prove me wrong.