As an expert witness whose former paratransit company, PTS Transportation, transported 1100 developmentally disabled passengers a day (in addition to scores of non-emergency medical patients for many years of this decade), we never experienced a single wheelchair tipover in an estimated 29M miles of travel, by a 70-vehicle fleet. There were two basic reasons for this:
1) Our drivers received sensitivity training by working, for several days, at one of the programs we served – a Center for Cerebral Palsy – where many of the most severely disabled of all our passengers resided. Many of our potential drivers couldn’t take it. Those who could, and became exemplary drivers, were virtually in awe of the courage of so many of these individuals (mostly adults). Many of these individuals could not speak. Many could not see. Many could not hear. A few had more than one of these disabilities. Most had a litany of other conditions with which most non-medical people were unfamiliar. Many were curled into a ball, lived that way their entire lives, and traveled only when someone could push and handle their manual wheelchairs. Some could not swallow whole food – and received nourishment their entire lives only through a feeding tube. The notion of not thoroughly and properly securing the wheelchairs of those of our clients who could travel only in a wheelchair was unthinkable. While our management certainly never encouraged anything like this, a driver who failed to secure a wheelchair feared being dragged into the alley between our building and the next one over and literally beaten.
2) Far more of a deterrent, if a driver did not secure a wheelchair properly, and anyone (including many of the occupant’s fellow-passengers, program staff to which we transported these individuals or, worse, our own management), we would have fired that driver on the spot. We were not about to wait for a tipover. In our system, no passenger got close to this happening.
The social service agency community is one which is infinitely smaller than others like the schoolbus community or transit industry. So I encounter the few violators within this community only because I now serve as an expert witness, and through that, become familiar with what I suspect is a tiny percentage of this community’s drivers. Yet also through my work, and my other associations with almost every public transportation community in the country – most closely the schoolbus, transit, paratransit and motorcoach communities, I have a much greater understanding of which of these communities care about disabled individuals than others. But even a quick snapshot should be a stunning awakening to most Americans – and a useful overview of the types of cases attorney are likely to come across: Reflecting that overview – every attorney with a case involving a wheelchair tipover needs an expert witness in this field – it is notable that more than 20 percent of the roughly 700 lawsuits in which I have served have been wheelchair tipovers. Yet the percentage of these that come from various communities is startingly different among them. Ranking them from best to worst:
The Schoolbus Community. While I have experienced some dreadful episodes of reckless indifference in this community – involving disabled students riding on both full-size buses and smaller buses – almost none involved wheelchair tipovers. My opinion about the principle reason for this is factor is that most schoolbus personnel – from management to drivers and attendants – love the passengers. More interestingly, they adore disabled passengers. To be fair, schoolbus drivers typically transport the same passengers to and from the same destinations day after day for an entire year – and often, for several years. So they get to know them. And they develop a close kinship with most of the passengers. Still, they seem to care more about disabled passengers than any others. If I had to guess (expert witnesses are not allowed to guess in depositions, reports or at trial), I would likely guess that most people who got to know a disabled individual would come to adore him or her. So not ensuring that their wheelchairs tipover is a rigorously followed goal, if not an exception. (The exceptions are only those who are poorly taught to do this correctly, and it includes attendants far more than it does drivers.)
The Transit Community. Completely unlike schoolbus drivers, transit drivers transport mostly different people day after day. In other words, most of their passengers are strangers. Secondly – and I feel more importantly – transit schedules are typically too tight, particularly in major cities. Properly securing even a garden-variety manual wheelchair, and affixing the lapbelt and shoulder hardness to that occupant once in the chair – can easily consume five minutes, placing a vehicle already behind schedule even more behind schedule. And other than when a driver kills a passenger or pedestrian, his or her union steward can manage to help the driver wriggle out of accountability with a short suspension, or more often, retraining – the latter every bit as pointless as it sounds. But the other transgression (beyond killing someone) that the union stewards cannot help their passengers escape accountability from is constantly completing their routes late. Transit agencies find a way to free themselves of drivers who constantly complete their runs even later than the rest of the drivers (who typically do so, just not as severely). Insofar as job security, securing a wheelchair is a risk. A study completed in 2011 by a company called Fall & Associates found that 73.6% of all wheelchairs carried on transit buses were either not properly secured or not secured at all. But in major cities, this figure is a fantasy: During the 23 years I lived and worked in Manhattan, periodically riding (mostly) crosstown buses (most on east-west streets perpendicular to the mostly north-sound subway lines to which many buses connected), I never once saw a driver properly secure a wheelchair. Usually, transit drivers did not secure wheelchairs at all. I never got the “feel” that transit drivers even liked such passengers – although, again, I suspect much of this was related to the extra time it takes to board them (often using a wheelchair lift or ramp) and alight them.
The Paratransit Community. While this certainly varies from driver to driver, a large number of paratransit drivers hate disabled passengers (which are the only passengers they carry) and loathe wheelchair users. As with transit drivers, paratransit schedules are often too tight. (Sometimes, almost every pickup or drop-off is late.) This stems largely because the routes differ day by day. And since the early 1990s, most of these routes are scheduled by software – i.e., robots. Also, most paratransit operations are parceled out, by their transit agencies, to private contractors, to which making money is the overwhelming principal goal. Unlike transit passengers, an excessively large percentage of paratransit passengers present challenges to drivers. But combined with the usually tight schedules, made worse by drivers who do not know the service area (and with different passengers from day to day), wheelchair users are the most trouble. So while disabled passenger are commonly disliked by paratransit drivers, wheelchair users are loathed. On top of this, they often know about proper wheelchair securement and whine to the drivers – not always nicely – when the drivers fail to do this. (Not securing a wheelchair will not get a paratransit driver fired. They sometimes are terminated when one tips over and the passenger is badly injured or killed – a roll of the dice, frankly.) Worst of all, transit agencies (who generally have the responsibility of providing paratransit service as well as fixed route transit service) hire a “software developer” to design the routes – and insist that they are as efficient as possible. But the contractor engaged to operate on these routes are simply stuck with them. Rather than brawl in the streets with the staff of these software developers, they simply commit safety compromises (see safetycompromises.com). The single compromise of passenger safety that shaves the most time from a route’s running time is to not secure a wheelchair.
The Non-Emergency Medical Transportation (NEMT)/Ambulette Community. As an expert witness, a large segment of wheelchair securement cases come from this community – considerably smaller than the paratransit community. But there are two rather esoteric reasons for this: The social service agencies with the responsibility to provide this type of service (a) know absolutely nothing about it. So after decades in which I would estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the funding was either stolen (by contractors submitting invoices for trips they never provided) or (b) by driving groups of them around in circles, these agencies began hiring brokers around the turn of this century. A few years later, almost every trip was provided by a broker. Like the agencies hiring them, brokers rarely have a remote clue about how to provide this type of service, which like paratransit, involves a different route every day – not some “fixed route” that often doesn’t change for years at a time. Worse – and their contractors with the agencies employing them rarely require this – brokers compensate NEMT providers only when (a) the vehicle is moving (b) with a certified NEMT client on board. In other words, when securing a wheelchair (almost always when the vehicle is not moving), the NEMT provider is making no money.
Some of these companies are more ruthless than they are ignorant. I have examined NEMT vehicles in which I determined that no wheelchair had ever been secured in them during the vehicle’s entire life spans. Often owners of these companies sabotage the equipment so that there is no way that a driver can possibly secure a wheelchair. Also, since the brokers don’t know what they’re doing, they can’t mold their army of almost-always ignorant service providers into a contractor capable of providing safe, on-time and efficient service (especially efficient). To these contractors, providing service that is safe, on-time and efficient it like juggling three cannon balls on fire. As a result, none of these three things are done. Among them, not securing wheelchairs is the easiest way to simplify the chaos of their ignorance.
Passenger Rail. While the ADA requires passenger rail service to have one “accessible car,” and one accessible bathroom (meeting the requirements of Part 37 of the ADA – i.e., with room for a 60-inch-in-diameter circle so that one can turn around a large wheelchair – many passenger rails systems (e.g., New Jersey Transit) use a “mezzanine” car as the accessible car – so no wheelchair user can use a restroom because one would have to climb up or town five steps to reach one. And no passenger rail trains have an “accessible restroom” with a 60-inch-in-diameter circle in it. More importantly, passenger rails systems have no securement systems. In fact, the space for a wheelchair in most cars is filled with suitcases, baby carriages, skis and other objects. So an un-secured wheelchair can’t even fit in it. In other words, in some cars, there is not a place to even put an unsecured wheelchair. If attorneys wanted to bother, I could make a good living merely helping attorneys sue AMTRAK and other passenger rail companies.
Motorcoaches. These vehicles actually do have wheelchair lifts (in a rear door that is no good for any other purpose. And many even have fold-up chairs to make a securement department – although this takes up the space of four seats. But loading and securing a wheelchair can take so much time (often four seated passengers are asked to move – and in a crowded motorcoach, they have to stand, while they are not designed for standees). So very, very few wheelchairs appear on motorcoaches. Their use for wheelchair is so rare that I have done cases where wheelchair users were asked by both the driver and a redcap (at an airport) to get out of their chairs and climb the front stepwell – often five steps, and on one model of an MCI coach, these five steps are trapezoids!
#wheelchairtipovers #wheelchairandpassengersecurement #civilrightsviolations #transalt #safetycompromises