One really strange factor no one would ever think of accounts for a considerable number of wheelchair tipovers: The positioning of chairs against the interior wall of the vehicle.
Because efficiency in demand-response service was always poor and became worse once scheduling software was introduced in the early 1990s, most drivers center the one or two chairs they transport (the tracks or ovals lie in a lateral position), instead of securing them against the walls. But a few modes – particularly transit – secure chairs against the wall, because the aisles must be traversed by the vast majority of passengers who are ambulatory. (And because the lift or ramps are always located in the front, almost every ambulatory passenger must pass by the secured chairs.) So if they were secured in the center, the majority of passengers would have to walk around them.
Yet positioning wheelchairs against the walls creates an odd challenge: The difficulty drivers have to reach the securement points on the wall side. Frankly, drivers must crawl on their knees to reach these positions – something awkward and even painful for those not wearing kneepads – a great idea that every transit agency I’ve suggested it to has rejected. One reason I suspect is the stigma of being a sissy – the reason that high school basketball players stopped wearing these useful devices decades ago, while pro players rarely do, even while the degree of contact (from falling down, bumping knees, etc.) is much greater at the higher levels of this sport.
But I’ve discovered another factor that discourages securing wheelchairs on the wall-side – although I could never prove this, so couldn’t use it in court: Able-bodied drivers (or in some cases attendants) feel humiliated having to crawl beneath a disabled individual, particularly in front of them – as thought they were bowing down to them.
Because the efficiency of demand-responsive modes (paratransit, NEMT service) has become so low, securing them in the center of these almost-always smaller vehicles alleviates this problem. Access to each corner of a wheelchair is effortless. Ironically, wheelchairs are often not secured in paratransit service, and far more rarely in NEMT service. The reasons for this may be found in the previous post, Part 14 (at the bottom of this post, click on the word “previous”). But, as noted, this practice also reflects the poor efficiency most demand-responsive services achieve. Compared to the simplicity of fixed route services – where the route and stops may not change for years at a time — a different group of passengers traveling on every vehicle every day was just too hard to grasp for almost anyone in the business. I discovered an exception to this reality during my direction of USDOT’s first nationwide study of special transportation for elderly and disabled individuals conducted in 1979 and 1980, two volumes of which were published by USDOT in 1981. The single exception was Tulsa, OK, whose system delivered nearly 11 passenger trips per vehicle service hour. (Most systems, in higher-density areas, delivered a trip and a half per vehicle service hour). But the director of that system – whom I believe figured all this out on his own – actually designed his paratransit system around a structure, taking advantage of a handful of factors like trip purpose and trip urgency. One can examine this almost wondrous system’s features in an essay I wrote about it – a condensation of the case study I wrote about it for USDOT – on my website, transalt.com: See https://transalt.com/principles-paratransit-system-design/.
Another factor that eroded efficiency was the emergence of scheduling software. Since live Earthlings could never figure out how to schedule efficiently – and never thought about the precious few variables that could be used to orient the design of a system around – they partially stampeded toward the use of scheduling software when it emerged in the early 1990s. Now, schedulers didn’t have to think about any relationships or patterns around which to orient a system’s designs. Instead, they simply learned to work the robots. In a consulting project I worked on in Edmonton, Canada in 2002, we found that most software could out-schedule an “average” scheduler – effectively a mediocre scheduler the system’s savvy director plucked from her small army of schedulers – by a small to moderate margin. But the geeks who designed these robots were not transportation experts either: They were “coders.” So their programs failed to follow the principles discovered by my mentor in this area from Tulsa. And learning only to “work the robots,” no scheduler ever learned about the factors that governed efficiency (again, these are identified in the essay noted above: https://transalt.com/principles-paratransit-system-design/.) That is why few transportation “experts” – at least none I have ever come across – under the age of 65 (and who began working in demand responsive systems 35 years ago) are of any value on the plaintiff’s side of a lawsuit. That’s why none of them can design an efficient demand-responsive system. And that’s why most healthcare agencies providing service to MediCare, Medicaid and VA-certified passengers stampeded even faster to brokers once they emerged in the late 1990s, allowing the public healthcare agencies to escape accountability for their dreadful inefficiency, and wiping their hands of any responsibility for designed, directing, training and monitoring any aspect of the systems for which they were given billions of dollars to run by the Federal government – effectively the Department of Health and Human Services.
Regardless, in terms of wheelchair tipovers, all this extra space, and the ease of attaching a wheelchair at all four points, in each corner, was for naught. Countless factors discouraged this ease – most importantly, the fact that in most demand-responsive modes, the scheduling is so incompetent that most schedules are still too tight. This problem was hardly rare: Of the roughly 700 lawsuits I worked on as an expert witness, I found that the schedules were too tight on roughly half of them – and not just for those modes carrying wheelchairs (where almost every tipover was at least partly the result of a schedule too tight) – but on most passenger molestation cases, and in the majority of crossing cases, and in almost every turning case (where the tight schedules translated into “rolling left turns” which often mowed down some pedestrian traversing the street into which the bus — mostly transit buses, whose schedules are almost always too tight – and usually walking in a crosswalk).
Finally, one reason that wheelchair tipovers are so rare in schoolbus service is the fact that the tracks (or increasingly, today, the ovals in Q-Straint’s QRT-max system) are arranged longitudinally within the vehicle, rather than laterally. This significant factor will be covered extensively in Part 16 of this series – in a few days.
#wheelchairtipovers #wheelchairandpassengersecurement #transalt #wheelchairpositioning