New Car: An Accessible Minivan
nicolagriffith.com
nicolagriffith.com
Imagine having to constantly rely on friends/family to even be able to go get groceries. Nicola alludes to this at the end without getting too political:
"We live at the bottom of a steep hill in a neighbourhood without sidewalks and many blocks from a bus stop. The only way for me to leave the house is in a car. Uber and Lyft have no accessible vehicles in Seattle [if they don't have it in Seattle, we can assume this also rings true for most of America]. There are a handful of wheelchair-accessible taxis but you have to book way in advance, they are obscenely expensive, and, worst of all, utterly unreliable."
And: "This van is insured for $91,300."
I'm guessing Nicola spent a long time gathering enough money to be able to gain the "luxury" of being able to move from A to B like a non-disabled person - so I am assuming moving to a highly urban setting (say, San Francisco) is financially out of the question due to the price of housing in such settings.
Conclusion: in our country, if you're disabled, be prepared to fork up an unreasonable amount of money to gain even a modicum of independence. By definition, this means most disabled people in this country cannot (financially) attain independence, and our infrastructure is the reason why.
I spent 10 months on crutches. An example: the useless fuckwits who designed BART made some stations so that, to use the elevators to get from the platform level to the street, you have to
1 - crutch to the elevators on the platform level
2 - get out on the station level
3 - crutch the length of the station to get to the swipe machines;
4 - crutch back the length of the station to get to the elevators from the station level to the street;
5 - stand in a standing pool in the center of the elevator of fucking bum piss and shit on your way to the street.
For those of you who've never used crutches, well, (a) good call, and (b) your armpits look like they should conveniently support your body. In actuality, it hurts. Crutching is uncomfortable, and being unnecessarily forced to crutch station lengths is terrible.
And btw, this stuff isn't rocket science. Anyone who thinks for perhaps 2 seconds about making buildings accessible to people with mobility issues will realize that limiting unnecessary travel distances is one of the best ways to increase mobility.
One of my family members has muscular dystrophy, which affects her ability to use and feel her legs. She can still walk very slowly, but she has an adapted car with hand controls. I thought I'd describe it, for those interested in the spectrum of car adaptation.
Her car is a standard mid-size automatic compact, with no adaptations other than a push-pull accelerator/brake hand control.
Unlike Nicola's car above, it doesn't have an electronic bypass for the hand controls - they're completely mechanical, with an ingenious system of sliding linkages connecting the hand lever to the pedals. The sliding links are what allows a pull on the hand lever to push the accelerator without simultaneously pulling on the brake pedal (which would obviously stop the hand lever from moving). They also allow the pedals to be used without the hand control moving, so it's easy for me to swap in to drive the car on long distance trips.
Even if these were inherently more expensive, and had higher costs due to lower production runs, it might save enough on other costs to be worth it. They would also be viable paratransit or Uber model rentals (assuming self driving becomes the default) so even $200k vehicles could work. If the system were sufficiently on demand and convenient, dropping ADA from existing large buses and other transit, making them cheaper and more reliable, could potentially be a net savings.
One day cars will be designed for people of all abilities.
As electrics start to go mainstream, we're hopefully also going to see a new era of creativity and innovation in their designs. Something which has been pretty stagnant for decades.