Accessible transport was a key target area for disability activism. Two activists tell their stories.
“It wasn’t a breach of the Disability Discrimination Act, because that only covered the vehicle, not the right to access it.”
Will Bee
Transport services were, says Will Bee, exempt from the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), and provisions that impacted on providers of public transport were not made until the Act was amended in 2005. He was lead director for the Disability Rights Commission, and as such sat as an observer on the Disabled Person’s Transport Advisory Committee. He recalls how even after the amendment, there was still much work to be done. He says: “When the legislation was passed, some of the engineering solutions that would ultimately make buses and trains accessible [were just being developed], but there was no thought on how [these solutions] could apply the reasonable adjustment duties to public transport. The last thing [anyone] wanted was some providers being deemed big enough… to make their buses accessible and others not, or different designs and different solutions.
“The last-minute compromise was the power to create regulations for accessibility. In 1998, they published the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Regulations, which set out provision not just for a wheelchair space, but lots of other features, which made it more widely accessible, but never got over the step up into the carriage, to be honest. These were followed in 2000 with the Public Service Vehicle Access Regulations for buses, which made them accessible. By that stage, low-floor buses were starting to come more widely into service, and it was possible to put in a ramp, and the regulation provided them for a wheelchair space, grab rails and space for guide dogs and priority seating.
“We’d had the regulations come in, and interestingly, we then started to get, particularly in London, the first problems where drivers were still saying, ‘You can’t come on’, and often without good reason. It was an accessible bus, there was perhaps someone standing in the wheelchair space, but the driver only had to say, ‘Excuse me, this wheelchair user needs to come on’, but they just didn’t like doing that sort of thing. So, they’d just say, ‘Sorry, you can’t come on. You have to wait for the next one’. It wasn’t a breach of the Disability Discrimination Act, because that only covered the vehicle, not the right to access it. So, the DRC campaigned to get an amendment to the DDA to remove and revise that exemption. I think it was the end of 2006 that that exemption was lifted, partially but not fully.
“But what’s been really quite striking is that between about ’95 and 2005, a lot of [the dialogue] was about design regulations, how to make vehicles accessible, and bus operators, train operators quite like those sorts of [challenges]… because they’ve got an engineering background, so they’re going, ‘Oh, yes, how could we do that? How do we get around that wheel arch there?’. But now it’s all physically accessible, it’s the much harder stuff – how do you make people behave properly to provide the staff support to make sure the other passengers don’t impede access? We’ve had noticeable problems over the wheelchair space on buses, and that actually resulted in a court case that went to the Supreme Court. That was a really important judgment, basically, the driver just saying, ‘Excuse me, would you mind getting out of that space?’. If the person says no, the driver has to take positive steps – the company has to make it clear that people should vacate the space, and the driver should be prepared if necessary to do things like say ‘Well, if you don’t move, this bus ain’t going anywhere’. So, there have been some quite positive measures there, but it is so much now down to the willingness of staff to be helpful, particularly on the rail network. That thing around staff behaviour is so critical, and that is so much harder to change than engineering.”
Creating accessible transport in Bristol
“That was the frustration – the legislation of it, the nonsense around disabled people’s travel, which I hope has gone now.”
Meryl Gaskell
When Meryl Gaskell began her role as a director for Bristol Dial-A-Ride, a transport service for Disabled people, in June 1993, she thought “I’ll go there for five years, and I’ll develop this service, and I’ll do a good job and then I’ll go and do something else”. In reality, she spent 14 years getting “a whole citywide service and 15 vehicles that are running”, by the end of which, she says, she’d “got £7 million worth of funding” and the service had “carried over half a million Disabled passenger journeys”. For her, though, it wasn’t just about statistics, but what the service meant to individuals – “all those people who could get out and be a bit more independent and get their own shopping and go where they wanted to go. Without that service, those people would be stuck at home… it was huge at the time. I’m glad I had a part to play in that”.
The job was a “two-pronged attack”. One was to run the accessible transport services, the other to campaign for accessible transport on mainstream transport – at the time, “none of the buses then were accessible at all”. The service had grant funding from what was then Avon County Council, who were, she says, “very supportive”. She also brought in funding from other parts of the country, and from Europe, and says that because the Disability Rights Movement was very active at the time, there was a high level of general awareness of the issues involved, both on the part of the council, and the public, not least because “everybody’s got a father, a mother, a daughter, and people knew of people, particularly older people, with mobility difficulties”. The passengers – up to 10,000 at the time – “were very vocal and active in talking to their local councillors about having the service in their area”.
She recalls one of the first things she tackled. She says “The legislation at the time said that because you were carrying Disabled people, you had to have ‘Ambulance’ in big letters on the side of the bus. Well there was no way we were going to do that. So [we] just ignored it. Then one day somebody did ask me about it, and I said, ‘Well, we did do it. It’s in big yellow letters on the side of the bus. Look, it’s just there. But then we went and painted the rest of the bus yellow to match’. That was the frustration – the legislation of it, the nonsense around Disabled people’s travel, which I hope has gone now.”
Fundraising for minibuses was in itself often frustrating because “everything took so long and was on the whim of whichever local authority you were working with” – committees “said they didn’t want any logos on the buses” but sponsors all want to have their stamp on things, and on one occasion, it took “42 different funders to put money in to buy one bus”. And there were other, wider-reaching frustrations. She remembers a nationwide meeting in which she announced: “‘I can increase your ridership by about half a million. If anybody wants to know, come and see me after’. So they all rushed over, ‘Ooh, Meryl, Meryl’. So I said, ‘All you’ve got to do is give time for people to get on board, to get to a seat and sit down before you move off, and then have some consideration for that when they get off the bus’. For a lot of people, that would be absolutely fine. [But] of course they couldn’t do it because they had schedules, timetables, rushing about.”
Dial-a-Ride did, however, have a significant impact in other ways – “advising about accessible issues on buses, they came to talk to us because we were the experts; we had all the latest equipment; we knew all about lifts and ramps.”
The campaigning side of the role was, she says, about demonstrating in a practical way that making transport accessible was relatively easy to achieve. One example was ‘Health Matters’, which, with the help of funding, provided “a couple of accessible cars” to take people to their own, specific health appointments, rather than being picked up “really early in the morning” on a group basis and needing to “hang around until later in the day” to be taken home again. She says: “So we got the vehicles. We liaised with the health centres, Southmead and Eastville, they arranged a dedicated parking bay. We worked out a sort of system of doing it – picking up individuals or two people if they’re next door, taking them to their health appointments, and then taking them home within half an hour of finishing. It wasn’t that difficult to arrange on a health centre basis. We did that for about a year’s project, and I think we showed that it was absolutely possible to do, and it wasn’t that expensive”.