by Penny Reeder
Wherever blind people gather, you can be sure of one thing. Transportation, or, more precisely, the lack of it, will be a topic of conversation. Do you recognize yourself in any of the scenarios described below?
Have you ever been to a meeting of your local ACB chapter where there wasn’t at least one person who arrived late — usually well after everyone else had introduced themselves, often after meals had been ordered, served, and put aside? When you have left those same meetings, did you bid farewell to people who were still waiting, often outside in the cold, or the heat, or the rain, or the snow, for scheduled rides which had still not shown up
How many of you have invested monthly income that you can’t really spare to purchase a cellular phone so you won’t feel alone or helpless during all those too predictable hours of waiting for rides that never materialize?
Many of us have advocated passionately for accessible voting — only to discover that finding a way to get to our “neighborhood” polling place was far more daunting than casting any ballot, even a printed ballot that we couldn’t read without sighted help.
Perhaps there’s a movie theater in your city where you can watch described films. Perhaps, too, it’s so much trouble to find transportation to that theater that few blind or visually impaired people ever even take advantage of the accessibility features. Perhaps the theater owners wonder why they even bothered to purchase the description equipment since so few blind or visually impaired people ever show up to take advantage of it.
Is there a mall where you live? Are there stores there where you can shop for just about anything you or your family might need? And does the bus that you have to take to get to that mall drop you off in the middle of a vast parking lot, so far from the stores, with so few landmarks for orientation, that you simply refuse to risk your personal safety to get to that mall and take care of your own personal needs independently?
On college campuses, which aspect of higher education is the most problematic for blind and visually impaired students? Yes, getting our textbooks on time and in the format that is right for us is a hassle. Yes, sometimes one needs a degree in cultural anthropology just to converse with the “helpful professionals” who are there to serve us in our disabled students’ services offices. There are the professors who simply don’t want blind students in their classrooms and roommates who don’t want to put up with our talking computers or other assorted paraphernalia. But finding one’s way across campuses bisected with dangerous, high-speed city throughways, and negotiating bus systems where drivers forget to call out the stops, or turn off the automated stop-announcement systems altogether: These are the problems that make blind and visually impaired college students tear out their hair, wring their hands, yell at their hapless guide dogs, and smash their mobility canes!
Have you ever missed a job interview because your paratransit vehicle was two hours late? Have you ever lost a job because, even though you were willing to take two separate buses and a subway train, and spend more than two hours in transit each morning, you just couldn’t get to the job, which had an official starting time of 8:30 on the dot, before 8:36? Are there jobs you simply won’t apply for — not because the jobs don’t seem to be a perfect match for your skills or interests or abilities, but because they are in a part of the county you simply can’t get to from where you live?
How many formerly sighted people do you know who consider the day they had to put away their drivers’ licenses the worst day of their whole lives? Do you know any blind people whose only social interactions center around talk radio? Have you ever known an older person who gave up on life altogether when she had to move into an assisted living facility because she could no longer get to the market to buy the groceries she needed?
All of these anecdotes — each sadly based on a true-life situation — describe the transportation and transit problems our community in general and each of us in particular must confront. ACB’s Transportation Task Force wants to hear your stories. Just how personally and how negatively has inadequate transportation affected your life? Please take a few minutes to answer the questions on ACB’s Transportation Survey, which is inserted in the middle of your “Braille Forum” (or recorded at the end of the issue if you read the magazine on audio cassette, or sent as a separate e-mail message if you receive the Forum in your in box). Computer disk subscribers, look for the survey as a separate file on your diskette.
The survey is quite comprehensive, and you may need to set aside some time to think about your replies, record them and return (via free matter, snail mail or e-mail) the survey. But the task force has concluded that the best way to communicate with policy makers, regulators, administrators and advocates is in the statistical and demographic language which serves as the tangible rationale for real-life solutions.
If you know blind people who do not subscribe to “The Braille Forum,” please encourage them to complete the ACB Transportation Survey online at the ACB web site, http://www.acb.org. The task force requests that you return your completed surveys as quickly as possible, and no later than April 28, 2003, so that members will have the time to collate and begin analyzing the results, in preparation for writing the resolutions which will surely result from the data. ACB looks forward to making a real contribution to resolving the transportation difficulties which are the subtext of so many of our daily activities. Thank you all for participating in this important project.