The next series of posts will explain this trend. And it will explain how plaintiff’s lawyers can make a fortune doing cases involving this theme right, and how defendant’s lawyers can walk away when they don’t. As an expert witness in more than 150 wheelchair tipover cases, I never lost one of them. And the last time I went to trial on one was 2002 (a transit case, where we only won $2.1M). Maybe it’s time to pay attention to the windfalls these cases can be.
This series will break down wheelchair securement in small segments — including some history to give you a feeling about why things are as bad as they are.
Origins of Wheelchair Transportation
I’m not old enough to know that much about wheelchair transportation on public transportation before 1964 – except for those cases where a wheelchair user could transfer from his or her chair to a fixed seat (usually the shotgun seat of a personal car). The first lift was invented by Ralph Braun in 1966. (Mr. Braun also built the first motorized wheelchair in 1962.) The lift that followed was installed on a postal Jeep, complete with hand controls. (Mr. Braun was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age seven, in 1947.) When Ralph passed away at age 72 in 2013, his company, Braun, was well-established as one of the two major life manufacturers in the country.
Before this technology began to spread, as noted, wheelchair users could only travel if they could get out of their wheelchairs. For emergency and non-emergency medical services, these individuals were placed on gurneys (or stretchers). Otherwise, they were unable to make any other type of trip. If a wheelchair users cannot be transferred out of his chair by non-medical personal (or those familiar with his or her condition) – where a transfer was even possible – that person could not travel. In most modes, transportation was available in many parts of the country less than a decade after Mr. Braun’s invention. Yet there are still voids in this transportation today: If a wheelchair users cannot transfer out of their chairs, or are too large to sit on a narrow to transfer to a chair narrow enough to fit through the doorway of a commercial aircraft – which in 2025 were rarely ADA-complaint in terms of width (32-inch clear width with door open 90 degree) – they cannot fly. Few small commercial aircraft have door opening widths this size.
Apart from airlines, it did not take much time for wheelchair lifts to spread. They were common on van conversions built in the 1970s, constructed on GM, Chrysler and Ford chassis or “cutaways.” By the mid-1970s – a decade and a half before the ADA was promulgated – these vehicles were common in cities throughout the country. And by the late 1970s, a rare handful of “systems” actually knew how to schedule them efficiently. When I directed USDOT’s first nationwide examination of these systems in 1978, I found Tulsa, OK providing 10.8 trips per hour (see Principles of Paratransit Design at https://publictransitexpert.com/principles-paratransit-system-design/. A few cities managed to provide slightly more than three passenger trips per hour; most provided only about 1.5.
These early systems were “demand-responsive” – either door-to-door or curb-to-curb. No Federal or State regulations require them. These cities only did this to provide mobility opportunities for elderly and disabled individuals. And while transit buses did not contain lifts, those who could manage to board were encouraged to sit in the first few seats behind the driver (on both sides of the aisle). This changed in 1976 for new buses when former President Jimmy Carter mandated “full accessibility,” which required lifts on all newly manufactured transit buses. As this mandate was then echoed it all or most states’ regulations, when it was reversed in 1980 during former President Reagan’s first week in office, buses had been produced with lifts for four years, they were used to this production, and state legislators did not have the courage to follow President Reagan’s lead and reverse their mandates. So transit buses largely contained lifts since 1976, with few interruptions.
Schoolbuses followed a similar pattern, beginning with lift on small vans. Some larger buses soon equipped their vehicles with lift – but “passive lifts” as they were called, as they did not morph back and forth into stepwells. So on large schoolbuses, these lifts were always in the rear (not completely in the rear, but just forward to the rear axle). With the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Educational Act (IDEA) in 1975 (its name was changed from the Education for all Handicapped Children Act in 1990), the provision for all students to be transported in the “least restrictive environment” results in more disabled students traveling, with regular students, usually on larger buses.
Finally, while most of the vehicles that carried wheelchair users contained some form of securing their chairs, formal requirements for this did not emerge until the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), in 1991.
The inclusion of wheelchair transportation on most modes of public transportation became common in the 1970s. Formal requirements for their securement did not emerge until 1991, with the ADA, although industry standards were established much earlier.
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