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There’s a public transit bus stop right across the street from my home. Sometimes I board a bus there. The driver simply flips a switch to deploy the ramp inside the front entrance. I roll my wheelchair up the ramp and onto the bus. It’s a breeze.
I think about how different things were thirty years ago, before the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. There wasn’t a single accessible bus in Chicago. There were three large steps inside the front entrance of each bus. But now I can access nearby public transit as readily as my neighbors who don’t use wheelchairs.
Well, maybe not. One block away from my home is a subway station with no elevator. My neighbors who walk can board the train there, but that station is as inaccessible to me as it was thirty years ago.
And it’s not just wheelchair users who are left out. In January, 22-year-old Malaysia Goodson died after falling down the steps of a New York City subway station. The station had no elevator and Goodson was carrying her one-year-old daughter in a baby stroller. The child was not hurt.
The ADA established a minimum access standard, which allowed some transit authorities to grudgingly do the least they could do to barely meet that standard.
Scaling stairs of inaccessible subway stations is such a serious problem for pregnant women and people traveling with strollers that Up-Stand, a group devoted to improving pedestrian access for pregnant women and families, protested a New York subway station renovation because plans didn’t include installing an elevator.
The ADA requires that “key stations” of subways be retrofitted to make them wheelchair accessible. All newly constructed stations must be accessible. But on subway lines in cities like New York and Chicago, there are big gaps between these stations with elevators.
According to the Chicago Transit Authority, 103 of the system’s 145 rail stations are wheelchair accessible. But the CTA has a plan, called ASAP, which aims to make every station accessible by the year 2038.
The CTA first announced this plan in 2016, as part of a series of events celebrating the ADA’s twenty-fifth birthday. It was presented as if it were a fabulous gift to the disabled community. But it’s hard to get excited about ASAP, considering that 2038 is nineteen years from now and forty-eight years after the ADA became law.
It’s true that ASAP goes above and beyond what the law requires. But that’s the problem: The ADA established a minimum access standard, which allowed some transit authorities to grudgingly do the least they could do to barely meet that standard.
Yet the ADA also issued a moral challenge to create full and equal access. If everyone who plans and funds transit systems had embraced this challenge, and strived to go above and beyond in the first place, we’d surely be a whole lot further along.
Maybe there would be an elevator at the station nearest my home, and at the station where Malaysia Goodson fell to her death.
The station nearest my home is slated to be renovated in stage four of the ASAP project, which is in the unspecified future. Coming up with the funding to fulfill that vague promise will require state and federal governments to care enough to cooperate, which doesn’t fill me with hope.
When the ADA’s fiftieth birthday rolls around in 2040, I might still be waiting.