This episode – one of perhaps 30 or more – deals with an inexcusable ability for vehicle converters to grasp the most simple of principles – the distance between securement points of a wheelchair and the failure of the Federal Transportation Administration to make any remote effort to educate those securing wheelchairs (mostly drivers and attendants) about how the industry must adapt to this reality. (A simple footnote would have been adequate.) This failure compounds the colossal failure of many modes to provide on-time service – including mostly transit, paratransit and NEMT service. This is far less true for pupil transportation service.
Because wheelchair tipovers are not tracked, it is difficult to even guess at the number of such episodes. My sloppy guess – based on receiving inquiries to serve as an expert on some tipover case almost every week – suggests that thousands of chairs tipover every day in this country. This installment of this series about why there are so many such mishaps is as primitive as are the solutions. But in this part of the nation’s government genuinely comprising the “Dead State,” the trail to solutions is as cold as it is dead.
Much of the blame for this problem lies with the FTA’s reluctant failure to change a single variable about this aspect of securement for 35 years now, while wheelchair development has gone through an understandable metamorphosis. Particularly with many advances in medicine, therapy and technology, , as well as courageous changes in the attitudes of so many wheelchair users — as their lives normalize like the ADA intended they should — a sloppy guess is that there must be at least 5000 varieties of wheelchairs available in the U.S., plus I expect some others elsewhere that Americans have not yet seen. Many of these chairs are known as “athletic chairs,” and have permitted yesterday’s disabled observers to participate actively in the joys of recreation and competition that these new and growing forces have given them. Just the same, all these chairs must be transported to and from these venues and events on accessible vehicles whose interiors have been frozen in time save for advances by the only noticeable U.S. securement monopoly, Q-Straight (emerging this century from a merger between Sure-Lok and Q-Straint) in the early Aughts, branding itself exclusively as Q-Straint in recent years. The sale of tiny and remotely-known AMF Brunswick chairs, from a company manufacturing a number of fine, low-cost models, has simply been crushed by the leviathan Q-Straint Monopoly that also makes a wide variety of high-quality manual wheelchairs.
Apart from funding an important project about 25 years ago – the SOWHAT project, that led to the creation of a “transportable wheelchair” — mostly by adding more-identifiable and mistake-proof attachment points to the four corners of most wheelchairs that should be secured at these four points, the FTA has failed to tweak its simple requirement for 48-inch spacing (mostly found on a single page – 49 C.F.R. §38.23(d) of the Act) to accommodate the explosion of new types of chairs entering the market. Q-Straint has actually compounded this problem by ironically adding dozens of new lap-and-shoulder belt configurations to the market – all or which cost more, and which provide add no value to the heretofore simple market of three-point occupant restraints systems that drivers have grown accustomed to use for decades. Instead, these “improved” (clearly more dangerous) modifications in lap-and-shoulderbelt systems have made passenger securement into wheelchairs exponentially more difficult for drivers who often struggle with (or ignore) the most conventional configurations – efforts already highly sabotaged by a variety of factors including poor training, virtually no monitoring, tight schedules, payment formulas (almost universal in NEMT service) and even sabotage by owners of many of these systems who deliberately make securement impossible since reimbursement formulas compensate them only for the time that the vehicle is in motion with a disabled occupant on board.
While the FTA had solicited comments on changes to the ADA in 2012, almost none were accepted. So the problems of wheelchair securement devices have effectively made the killings and maiming worse than they appeared to be before the newest array of wheelchairs began to emerge into the market. Given a slim chance in 2012 to comment on potential rulemaking changes, I recommended increasing the length between securement points longer – extending the distance from the current 48-inch minimum to 60 inches. Of course, such a change would translate into many operators having to purchase larger van- and minibus conversions, while at each successive level (ranging from a 150-series to a 550-series vehicle) could add an additional $10,000 or more to the cost of the vehicle. At the same time, the prowess in wheelchair transportation efficiency appears to have shrunk: While a former system I operated in a huge service area decades ago delivered five trips per vehicle service hour, I continue to serve as an expert in lawsuits where drivers testify that they rarely (many have testified “never”) transport more than one wheelchair at a time. And I have also seen vehicles in which no wheelchair of any type or size has ever been secured into it during the vehicle’s entire lifespan.
Forgetting for a moment about the transition to using robots (“scheduling software”) for scheduling purposes that coincided closely with the promulgation of the ADA in 1991, a more curious problem has arisen. While one can easily pull 30 or so inches of strap out from the typical modern housing of most securement devices, the length of most of these devices is roughly 13 ½ inches with not a millimeter of strap pulled out from their housings. As a consequence, there is no problem securing larger wheelchairs with securement points further and further apart (and the W-19 chairs designed to facilitate securement often have these points further apart, while some I have seen have made them closer together), the problem is that one cannot make these securement devices SHORTER. Placing one of these devices at each end of a wheelchair within the ADA-compliant minimum 48-inch longitudinal space leaves only 21 inches between securement points (48 – 27 = 21).
Most wheelchairs have securement points 21 or more inches apart. Plus, keep in mind that most non-W-19 wheelchairs do not have defined securement points, and drivers and attendants have some latitude about where to affix the wheelchair end of a securement device on any given model of wheelchair. And those with these securement points further apart are even better, since several feet of strap can be pulled out of both the rear and front securement device housings. But when the securement points are less than 21 inches apart, a chair like this simply cannot be secured at all. This orientation is occasionally found on motorized wheelchairs – which are more likely to tip over, unsecured, than a garden-variety wheelchair because their wheelbases are shorter and they are heavier – with more weight on the rear of the chair (mostly two lead-acid batteries and the structure to hold them in place).
More troubling is longitudinal spacing less than the required 48 inches apart. For example, I found at least one vehicle I can remember where the Q-Straint Max-QRT “ovals” (over which the securement hardware’s discs would have to cover) lay only 40 inches apart – leaving only 13 inches for the space between a wheelchair’s securement points. No wheelchair I have ever seen is small enough to have such spacing between its securement points. (Few chairs are made for children – and most of these are even two large to accommodate the needed spacing.) Instead, most children who cannot walk – and, frankly, most children overall under a certain age or a certain weight (depending on each state’s requirements for “child car seats”) must sit in a child seat. So, frankly, there is no point in building a wheelchair this small – although I believe I have seen one or more on a T.V. commercial for St. Jude’s hospital (I obviously could not measure it, and doubt the individual in such a chair would be transported in it, since such a chair could not be secured).
There seems to be too little demand for anyone to build securement hardware – a combination floor fitting, housing to contain the strap wound around an interior spool and the rubber-coated “J-hook” at the other end any shorter than the combination would be – although I have seen one such device only 11 ½ inches in length. So my strong advice to any vehicle converter placing two securement areas in tandem is to use every inch of floor space and treat the 48-inch minimum requirement as just what it is – a minimum – and place the securement hardware a few inches further apart.
#wheelchairandpassengersecurement #wheelchairtipovers #wheelchairtranpsortation #transalt #publictransitexpert