In the last installment of this series of posts, I discussed fixed route transportation, with a few references to demand-response transportation. Now, as we begin to explore this exponentially more complex form of transportation, we will begin to see why wheelchair tipovers are so common.
My sloppy estimate – based on little but my feeling about the failure of transportation in America – is that perhaps 10,000 wheelchairs tipover, during transportation, every day. Perhaps it is 20,000, Perhaps it is only 2,000 – although while I don’t opine this way, ever – I suspect the latter is a low number.
But if 10,000 tipovers occur every day, that does not mean that 10,000 lawsuits will emerge from them. Using these figures only for conceptual purposes (there are no data supporting any of these “guesses”), only one out of every 10 wheelchair overs trigger some sort of injury or a fatality (these are the lawsuits I serve as an expert in). Of the 1000 suits where someone is hurt, few are hurt badly enough to entice a lawyer to assist the potential plaintiff. Of the 100 where someone is hurt badly, he, she or his or her parents, children or siblings are usually unable to find and engage an attorney at all; or if they are, they engage one who settles for peanuts and lies to his or her clients about why they should take the peanuts (“I know this doesn’t seem like much money, but there are some problems with your case”); these are the crooked, lazy attorneys who large earn a living “on volume”). Of those 10 cases left where an excellent attorney is engaged, someone like me is engaged – and sometimes these attorneys actually listen to me, I do a lot of work, and we settle for a bundle. But as we explore the causation of tipovers – in almost EVERY ONE, the vehicle was running behind schedule when the chair tipped over, or the schedule was too tight. So this exploration of the operation of demand-responsive transportation holds the key to the number of tipovers that we have a record of.
When I say “a record of,” I mean a lawsuit is filed. Unlike the most simple fender bender, no one summons the police after a wheelchair tipover. Often an ambulance is summoned. But without a police report, the number of tipovers is not recorded. And while the drivers’ supervisor is usually summoned, and the driver (and sometimes the supervisor) craft an “incident report,” these individuals know they are going to be sued, and the driver’s incident report is lucky to be more than a paragraph long. And even when the driver knows the ultimate cause – often the vehicle was running behind schedule, the driver did not spend the time it takes to secure a wheelchair, or its occupant into it. So while an occasional driver is fired – despite there being considerable causation beyond the driver that only individuals like myself discover when I am allowed to – most are not even reprimanded. If and when some form is discipline is considered, the driver’s “union steward” (for union operations, obviously) can often discourage or water down the discipline. Plus many systems that try to hold drivers accountable have a “point system,” where often points are erased after a year of safe driving.
As a consequence of this layer of factors – even with sloppy estimates of numbers based only my “feelings” about it from 50 years of experience in the field (including directing the operations of my own accessible paratransit system providing 1100 trips a day to disabled adults and infants for a full decade). The transportation industry has no remote interest in counting, recording and documenting the number of wheelchair tipovers a day, a week, a month or a year. If it did, there would be no means to monitoring the accuracy of such reporting. So with no interest in wheelchair tipovers, and periodic lawsuits being an occasional nuisance, my unsupported guess of 10,000 tipovers a day is hardly unreasonable or excessive.
Of course, these sloppy estimates hide a considerable number of shenanigans. For example, even of the serious cases where a wheelchair user is badly injured or killed, many drivers pick up the chair, secure it properly, pick up the passenger (a violation of the Cub Scout Handbook) and position the occupant into the chair, and transportation him or her to the appropriate destination, as if nothing at all had happened. In a few cases, drivers have dropped off dead bodies as if nothing had happened and feign surprise when a medical worker (on the front end of the trip) or a paratransit, son, daughter, sibling or attendant at an assisted living center or nursing him discovered that the patient is not breathing. And I am speaking of those case where the wheelchair user was seriously injured or killed. So it not hard to imagine such goings-on when the victim of a wheelchair tipover is not hurt badly enough for his or her parents or medical care staff simply receive the occupant. The frequence of such occurrences where the tipovers seriously injure or kill the occupant suggests that such “cover ups” comprise an extraordinary percentage of tipovers. Yet because Americans are so woeful at efficiency, and in many cases do not care, the majority of wheelchair trips involve only a single wheelchair.
In fact, I have served as an expert in a number of cases where the driver testified that, during a period of several years, he or she has never transported more than one wheelchair at a time. A bi-product of this inefficiency is, of course, that there are no witnesses. And in depositions, a badly-injured wheelchair user with a litany of disabilities is no match for even the typically dumb-as-a-post driver, often earning minimum wage to a tad more, patently unqualified for the job, and typically untrained or poorly trained, and almost always, completed unmonitored.
So, with tight schedules, and the driver often committing a litany of “safety compromises” on every trip (see safetycompromises.com), failing to secure a wheelchair, it takes little thought to realize that the most time that can be saved on a route is by not securing a wheelchair – which can take a driver dealing with a familiar garden-variety manual wheelchair several minutes. While technologies can easily track speeding (in the system I operated manually, I was able to determine speeding from my review of drivers’ logs) – such as GPS equipment, it is often only recorded and not observed in “real time.” And while video cameras are more and more common, and would catch most driver activities and errors, management “pulls” the videos and examines the footage only when the driver has a complaint about the passenger. This footage – which is “written over” every few weeks – is almost never “pulled” used to record the conduct and performance of the driver.
As a consequence of such reckless indifference, it is not hard to imagine that the sloppy estimates I cited above approach being realistic. In the next installment of this series of posts, I will examine the difficulties today’s personnel (most of them robots) have in designing demand-responsive transportation systems, and in running them safety, reliably (i.e., measured in on-time performance) and efficiently.