DISABILITY ISSUES
Vol. 19 No. 1

As a policy researcher who happens to be a wheelchair user with a speech impairment, I have traveled a good bit on business and for pleasure over the last 30 years. In this time I have experienced travel situations ranging from laughable to outrageous to life threatening.

Here are a few typical tales:

The Bermuda law, that's right, law, banning power wheelchairs from the island was perhaps the most egregious access barrier I ever experienced. In 1980 I challenged this law by returning to Bermuda with my family in my power wheelchair, after being threatened with house arrest in my hotel if I did so. I appealed to the press here and on the island; the Minister of Transportation backed off, and the Governor invited us to tea. The Minister was edified to find out that in the States liability for power chairs is covered by homeowners' insurance, the legal precedent being riding lawnmowers, which like wheelchairs are classed with furniture. Subsequently the Bermuda Parliament passed a law permitting power wheelchairs, but only if registered as motor vehicles and equipped with horn, headlight, tail lights, and turn signals. That l aw may have since been changed. I haven't been back to find out.

In the early 70s I was bumped from a flight from Boston to Ohio for a family holiday reunion. The basic problem was that the flight had been overbooked and they wanted to bump someone, but I was given various reasons for being left at the gate after being the first passenger to arrive there: "You must travel only with a companion who can evacuate you from the plane if necessary;" Your wheelchair won't fit in the baggage compartment; "Your presence on the plane would endanger other passengers;" "The captain or any member of the flight crew (including stewardesses) has the right to refuse to transport you, and they are exercising that right."

That sort of thing doesn't happen anymore, since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 set the airlines straight on their responsibilities. I have to travel alone often. The airlines know they are supposed to help me board, which involves transferring me onto and from the narrow little special chair they have to squeeze down the aisle into my seat. Some aisle seats on most planes have an arm that swings up out of the way, making the task easier for them, if they can figure out which seat it is, and if the flight attendant doesn't insist they not put me there "because other passengers will have to climb over him. "Moving me to the window seat from the aisle is especially difficult if they have sent two skinny little persons of the female persuasion from the check-in counter to do all this heavy lifting. (I am heavy at 6' and 180 lbs., but not obese. And what if I were obese?)

But even burly guys who don't listen can be a problem. On a recent red-eye flight from California to Boston, my flight arrived late, and there was no one to get me off the plane. Finally two large baggage handlers were recruited for the task. They managed to pry me out of the window seat where I had been placed and lift me onto that skinny little aisle chair, then strap me in, despite lacking any comprehension of English. When they started to carry me down the plane's tail stairs head first, with one of the railings stuck and not deployed, I got frantic, trying to insist they turn me around to go feet first (having visions of falling on my head and being more severely injured). These guys couldn't understand a word I said, and their operating philosophy seemed to be, "When in doubt, plow ahead." I grabbed the sole railing and wouldn't let go till they turned me around. But I had already missed my ground connection, and I can't just hop into any old cab.

A few years ago, after a 3-day meeting in Chicago, I had a 24-hour layover in Pittsburgh for another one-day business meeting on my way back home to Boston. The baggage crew had my scooter-type power wheelchair waiting at the end of the jetway in Pittsburgh, which is always supposed to happen but often doesn't. When I turned on the key, there was no power. The guys in Chicago had taken off the steering column to make it easier to stow. On this model the steering column doesn't come off. All the control wiring had been detached. Two jet mechanics spent 3 hours trying unsuccessfully to put it back together. Then I was offered the loan of an airport wheelchair, which was rather lame, since it meant having to be pushed around all the next day. That is indeed how I spent my day in Pittsburgh. It cost the airline $1,500 to have the wiring harness replaced and the chair repaired; it cost me a week in a loaner chair and a lot of aggravation.

There is absolutely no reason why the first seat inside the airplane door in the first-class section can't be outfitted to be easily detached and temporarily removed, so the wheelchair user can enter the plane from the jetway and be secured as in paratransit vans with straps. A lot of inconvenience to all parties (and liability) would be avoided by transporting wheelchair users in their own chairs. Often my airline handlers will transfer me into that seat anyway because if makes their lives easier, there is more space, and then I get to enjoy a first-class meal.

Then there are the Amtrak trains, where doors into the car are too narrow to maneuver in many power chairs, the sole wheelchair spot is adjacent to the invariably smelly bathroom, and there are no seat belts or tie-down straps. At smaller stations where the tracks are not sunken, the car entrance is several feet off the ground, for which they have a too-small and very rickety platform lift. Up in the air like that I always feel like the Pope must, weaving back and forth in the air on his sedan chair, waving gingerly to the crowds, and trying to look nonchalant.

The hotels, once one gets to a destination, can make a person wish they hadn't arrived. In a large Texas hotel (and what other kind are there?) I was given a wheelchair room on the 22nd floor. But only a contortionist could have reached the 22 button in the elevator from a wheelchair.

For our honeymoon in Acapulco years ago, my travel agent strongly advised booking the city's only wheelchair room in a popular American hotel chain's facility. We arrived to find a sunken lobby the 3 steps of which kept me from the bank of elevators.

All that week we had to use the service elevator that was programmed for a mandatory stop in the kitchen. The prized wheelchair room was already occupied by a non-disabled couple and it wouldn't be available till the next day. We made do the first night and every night thereafter, as it turned out the special room's only access feature was a bracket handle on the wall at the head of the bed. The only saving grace of this experience was the $100.00 a magazine publisher paid me for the satirical article I wrote to get my revenge on that hotel chain.

And yet I was very pleasantly surprised recently in a small Connecticut city when the tow truck dropped us off at the only hotel after the car we were driving totally died on a highway off-ramp. It was a small hotel with only one wheelchair-accessible room, which luckily was not already occupied and which had been very expertly retrofitted for complete access, even with a roll-in shower. It was the only thing that salvaged that day!

A top-notch, luxury hotel in the Washington, DC area, into which I semi-annually booked large project meetings with numerous wheelchair users, accommodated us to the extent of rolling up and temporarily storing the Oriental rugs in the elevators. But their emphasis on service to guests went too far: The cleaning persons invariably "set the room right" every time I left it, returning the telephones to their prescribed places, where I couldn't reach them, so I couldn't phone to complain. And yet I was awakened early the first morning by the vibrating alarm clock under the pillow that the presumably deaf previous guest had left set for 5:30!

And, bless that hotel in Minneapolis with button-activated door openers on restrooms in its conference area! I can invariably get in just fine, but can't pull the door open and steer my chair with my one good hand to get back out at the same time. Once in a deserted airport men's room I did manage to take off my tie, loop it through the door handle, pull the door open, and zip through before the wheelchair cab, for which I was being paged, left for town.