Last week, the Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) filed a lawsuit against Lyft in California for not having any wheelchair-accessible vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area. By not having the adequately equipped vehicles to accommodate passengers in wheelchairs, Lyft is violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.
However, this is far from being the only case that transportation has been made inaccessible to people with disabilities, nor is California the only state with this problem.
For example, in New York City, only 112 of MTA’s 472 subway stations are accessible, and out of those, 100 are currently working in both directions. Additionally, less than 1,800 of the city’s 13,000+ yellow cabs are equipped with wheelchair lifts or ramps, which means less than 15% of the taxis are accessible to New Yorkers with mobility difficulties.
However, as we approach a new era of transportation, notably driverless cars, it is crucial to keep the issue of accessibility at the forefront of our minds.
During this year’s SXSW conference earlier this month, a group of panelists tackled this exact issue at a talk sponsored by the US Department of Transportation (DOT), titled, “Accessible Transportation for All.” Moderated DOT’s Associate Administrator for Research, Demonstration and Innovation Vincent Valdes, the panel was about the various initiatives that have to take place to make sure the future of transportation will accommodate people with disabilities and the elderly.
Valdes described a scenario that is very likely to take place in 2020 and asked the panelist the accessibility aspects of said scenario: a young professional woman who uses a wheelchair uses an automatic trolley vehicle to drive her to the train station. All systems are operating in real-time, so there’s no way she can miss her train. The trolley can pick up additional passengers, but it’s up to the woman since she’s the one who requested first. Everything is operated on a mobile app and all payment is being processed through the app.
Maria Town, the director of the Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities in Houston, Texas, was the first one to push back on the feasibility of the scenario to be universal throughout the country. Currently, in 2019, rural places like southern Louisiana don’t even have services like Uber or Lyft readily available, so it’s doubtful that they’ll be able to catch up in the technological front in just 20 years.
A lot of this technological delay stems from societal standpoints often regarding people with disabilities. Town explained, “The Americans with Disabilities Act is approaching 30 years. Right? At this point, people with disabilities should be able to expect the same kinds of service as other folks. Yet consistently companies like Uber and Lyft deny service to people with service dogs, deny service to individuals who look visibly disabled and they're afraid of them. As I was thinking through that scenario, I kept thinking of all of the little things that would have had to have been addressed to make that moment possible. So, the platform itself would have to be accessible. She may use a wheelchair, she might also have low vision. She might also have limited dexterity. So, the app itself needs to be accessible. A question that I always have whenever an app upgrades, is will my blind friends be able to use it?”
On a micro level, the automatic trolley needs to have the capability to provide all the services a human driver does, and its service truly equitable. Bonnie Epstein, the senior planner at Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority, pointed out, “If [the hypothetical woman] is in a wheelchair, how does she gets strapped into the wheelchair? That's something that we think about— whose responsibility is that? There's, I know there's a lot of liability involved with that, with wheelchair accessible vehicle providers. And then the app that she's using, something that we get a lot is, uh, is that equitable? Can someone without a smartphone or credit card be able to use the same sort of system.”
However, John Zimmerman, a professor of artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, had the most optimistic view out of the other two panelists. He believes that the medical field of technology will exponentially advance by 2040. He said, “There are other emerging technologies that could make this future scenario actually happen. There's a bunch of new technologies. I'm curious, like would she be in a wheelchair or would she have a set of augmented legs. A wheelchair is sort of a fixed view, and there's a bunch of new technologies coming out that are much more on the body.”
Zimmerman strongly believes that there would be a tremendous improvement in the realm of adaptive and medical technology that will improve the lives of people with disabilities, so equipment like wheelchairs would be a thing in the past.
Although all these innovated technologies are emerging, many people with disabilities would not be able to afford them. According to the National Disability Institute, more than 25% of Americans with disabilities live in poverty, and half have an annual household income of $35,000 or less.
Even prevalent today, technology is growing exponentially at a pace that policies and laws cannot fathom to keep up. Matters are worse when it comes to adaptive technology—people who need them cannot pay out of pocket, especially at their astonishingly high prices, and public healthcare insurance like Medicare and Medicaid do not cover much of the needed technology.
Before the future utopian world of transportation and technology can come to fruition, the U.S. needs to restructure and reevaluate the way its laws and policies are created and updated. It’s time that people with disabilities stop being treated as second class citizens, especially during today’s age and time.
