Author: Edward Carney
When public accommodations for the disabled are missing, people generally don’t notice it until they or someone they care about is affected.
That isn’t a moral judgement or a criticism of the masses. I think it’s a fairly obvious statement of fact. Daily life gives us all an overabundance of things to focus on and worry about, so it’s only natural that when we encounter small obstacles, we tend to climb over them and continue moving forward, without pausing to consider those of our neighbors who might not be able to do the same.
In this sense, it requires constant effort to maintain awareness of disability rights. But the value of that effort is made apparent, on reflection, by the very same tendency toward self-interest that makes most people avoid it.
It’s been said that disability accommodations are the one topic of social justice that everyone should be personally invested in, because barring sudden death in the prime of one’s life, it’s the one topic that will personally affect all of us at one time or another. That’s an uncomfortable truth that many are keen to avoid thinking about, but fortunately, there are simple ways of reflecting on how society treats its most vulnerable individuals, without dwelling on one’s own pending infirmity.
One way of engaging with that topic is to simply navigate your world without a car from time to time.
It’s much easier – sometimes almost effortless – to think about accommodations for the disabled after you’ve made a habit of bicycling in an urban environment. It only takes one near-collision or one needlessly aggravating detour around hostile infrastructure for a cyclist to understand how much of our lived environment has been designed and maintained to maximize convenience for the many, at the expense of basic safety and quality of life for the few.
After taking part in the first of its Canalside Mobility Justice Rides in May, I reached out to Colored Girls Bike Too and asked whether I could assist in planning future rides. Specifically, I offered to scout planned routes prior to the third Thursday of each month, to check for any safety concerns and assess its overall comfort for the day of the ride. Jolanda Hill, the organization’s founder, kindly took me up on the offer, and thus gave me an opportunity to expand my amateur inquiry into the societal consequences of making cars a veritable necessity of life.
My frustration with this imposed dependency may never have had a clearer justification than when I was tracing the route for the July 16 ride, which was designed to honor Disability Pride Month by taking participants from Canalside to St. Mary’s School for the Deaf, on Main Street, and then to the Olmsted Richardson Campus, site of the former Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane.
While the theme for the July ride did not necessarily increase my awareness of poor infrastructure and absent repairs, it did reinforce my perception of those things as putting cars ahead of people, and motorists ahead of those who either do not or cannot drive, whether on account of physical, cognitive, or financial limitations, or simply as a matter of choice.
At one point, when tracing the route, I stopped to consider how riders might best navigate past a patch of rough road, when I was greeted by the sight of a woman with a walker and a man with a cane crossing the street together, by way of a sunken, cracked, and broken crosswalk. Navigating around it was likely not an option for them, and I wonder whether nearby motorists were able to appreciate the potential consequences of this.
In most cases, a pothole in the middle of the road poses a threat to a driver only insofar as it could damage their car and cause them to incur a hefty repair bill. A pothole at the edge of a crosswalk may go virtually unnoticed by the same driver, but the danger that it poses to pedestrians may be far more severe, especially when those pedestrians are disabled.
My test-run of the latest Mobility Justice Ride made me acutely aware of this difference when it led me past some unrepaired road damage at the intersection of Colvin Avenue and Amherst Street. Although I’d noticed it before, I have yet to take the initiative to demand that the city fill that massive gouge, which follows the edge of the crosswalk and is near enough to the curb that a cyclist rounding the corner could rather easily catch their front wheel and be ejected into traffic.
My inaction is a mark of shame, because I recognize that longer the damage remains there, the likelier it becomes that someone will be killed at that corner. And if that happens, it’s a safe bet that the victim will be someone who was not protected by a car.
Fortunately for me, when I notice small dangers like that, I rarely have much difficulty navigating around them. But because every close call prompts me to imagine what the worst-case scenario would be if I failed to notice an obstacle or swerved at the wrong moment, it takes very little additional effort to imagine how much worse those obstacles are for people who cannot so easily avoid them, or are forced to navigate around them every day, not on a bicycle but in a wheelchair or with another disability aid.
My failure to raise alarms about the corner of Colvin and Amherst is made all the more shameful by my understanding of why it hasn’t been fixed. The gouge is deep and wide enough to threaten the life of a cyclist, but no so much so that drivers are forced to swerve around it. And there are just so many more drivers than there are cyclists.
Absent prior organization, people only band together to demand improvements when the existing deficiencies affect them personally. And absent real principles, government officials will give priority to the complaints that are loudest and most insistent, not to those that are most reasonable. I feel certain that that’s the essential reason why there are places downtown where the potholes at the edge of the curb have recently been filled, but the sidewalks directly adjacent to them remain in complete disrepair, threatening the safety of anyone who walks there.
In other words, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, but only when the wheel is connected to an internal combustion engine, as opposed to a bike chain, or a chair.
As it stands, when discussing my impression of Thursday’s route with CGBT, there was no recommendation I could make regarding the corner of Colvin and Amherst, other than to take care in avoiding it. Thanks in part to how the Kensington and Scajaqueda Expressways cut off the southern half of Delaware Park from areas to the east and north, there was simply no way of adjusting the route without altering it completely.
Such limited alternatives are frustrating when you’re in a car, and far more frustrating when you’re on a bicycle, where every detour brings with it the demand for more physical exertion. So, I can hardly imagine how dispiriting it must be to face the same constraints when trying to navigate your community with limited mobility. But the obstacles that you barely notice in a car and quickly weave around on a bicycle could, for people with access to neither, be an insurmountable barrier to simply crossing the street and spending some time in the park.
I firmly believe we should all be making more effort to understand what that experience might be like – and to do so before it inevitably becomes our own experience. More to the point, I believe that if people took time to travel through Buffalo and the surrounding area on foot, by bicycle, or with public transportation, that understanding wouldn’t require nearly as much effort.
This isn’t an appeal for people to give up their cars or to completely subordinate their convenience to other people’s demands for social justice. It’s just a way of saying that there’s value in slowing down to look at the parts of your city’s infrastructure that you don’t ordinarily use, and to recognize the valid needs of those who do use them, whether out of necessity or out of choice, or who might someday.
It’s an exercise in mindfulness that may begin with matters of transportation and disability rights, but later find outlets among many other areas of life and other sources of misaligned self-interest. Ultimately, it may lead more people to help build a society that not only prioritizes human beings over cars, but acknowledges equal value in every person and every community that is just trying to navigate around the potholes that life has placed in their way.