One characteristic of almost every wheelchair tipover – not commonly known or even suspected by “civilians” not involved as professionals in public transportation (ranging from a driver and attendant to a system’s CEO or General Manager) but well known to almost everyone and anyone actually involved in transportation, is that almost every wheelchair tipover occurs when the vehicle is running behind schedule. And in most of these cases, the schedule is too tight.
As a result of a schedule being too tight, in order for a driver to keep from falling even further behind schedule, he or she must commit compromises in safety (see safetycompromises.com) – including safety involving passengers, pedestrians, motorists, fellow professional drivers, motorcycles and bicycles. Not to sound trivial, but in parts of the country like that where I reside, it is not uncommon to run over a deer – and with a large deer, a serious danger to the driver and shotgun passenger as well as to the deer: Its spindly legs are chopped off in a nanosecond, and the heavy torso can easily fly over the hood and through the windshield. But in wheelchair securement, while proper securement holds the chair and its occupant in place in a 20 g-force collision, a driver merely slamming on his or her vehicle’s brakes might create a single g-force exerted on the passengers (and anything else secured or not secured on the vehicle, such as the seats and seat legs).
As an expert witness, I have always found it disappointing that so many lawyers – the vast majority of them, frankly – are so disinterested, so cheap and/or so stupid as to not grasp the childlike connection between a tight schedule and its consequences, and to be so disinterested as to express no remote interest in examining this relationship. But on those occasions where I have been allowed to ride-and-time a route’s schedule, I have always found the schedule to be too tight. On transit buses, I always ride-and-time them in the middle of the day, between rush hours, when they should not nearly be their tightest. While I don’t expect America to be Norway or Japan, I am still surprised how few transit agencies adjust many (or sometimes any) of their routes’ schedules to allow more “running time” during the AM and PM rush hours.
There are all kinds of safety compromises that shave time off a route’s running time – all of them dangerous for various reasons that I will not explore here, as they would fill a thick volume. To simply enumerate them, they include rolling left turns, shopping on the wrong side of the intersection (to avoid getting “stuck in a light” they can avoid), speeding (obviously), failing to kneel the bus, pulling the vehicle away from a stop before a just-boarded passenger has reached a seat of point-of-securement (usually a vertical or horizontal stanchion), not pulling to the curb, sloppy boarding or alighting, nosing the bus into the stop and, of course, not securing a wheelchair.
Some of these compromises may individually shave little time off a route’s running time. For example, it takes a total of about six seconds to kneel and then raise the right front corner (or right side) of a bus. But on certain long routes, for example, with a myriad of reasons to kneel the bus (to accommodate an elderly passenger or because a parked car is blocking the bus’ access to the curb, e.g.), a route with 90 stops may need to kneel at every third stop. So even with six seconds per kneeling-and-raising, failing to do this can shave a full three minutes off a route’s run. On a rainy or snowy day, its might be prudent to kneel the bus at every stop – even when both doors lie between six and 12 inches from a raised curb (the industry standard).
More pertinent to this discussion, of course, is failing to secure a wheelchair. Unless the driver is excellently trained, it can take one four or five minutes to properly secure a wheelchair (at all four wheel positions) and then affix two seatbelts to the passenger (in one of many configurations) and finally affix a shoulder harness to that seatbelt (or a position in a track section or disc in the floor). For this reason (among many others), wheelchairs are not secured on many or most types of public transportation vehicles (schoolbuses are the major exception). [See Part 6 of this series for some economic reasons for this failure – many of them deliberately engineered by the system’s owners or managers.] A study by Fall & Associates (2011) found that 73.6 percent of all wheelchairs on transit buses were not secured or fully secured. I find this result disturbingly conservative: During the 23 years my office was located in Manhattan, during which time I road hundreds of bus routes (in NYC and New Jersey for my own use, and throughout the country for forensic purposes – where I usually timed the routes and observed a cornucopia of safety compromises (see safetycompromises.com) – I never ONCE observed a driver securing a wheelchair properly. In most cases, drivers did not secure them at all. And while the equipment has evolved, thankfully, as late as the early aughts (2000 to 2010), I observed equipment that would not even allow proper securement – like the “C-clamps” into which drivers must slam a chair’s rear tires into the backs of open clamps in order to enclose the surrounding brackets around the tires — rattling (and possibly loosening) the occupant’s teeth in the process) — and which provided no means to secure the front of the chair – allowing it to tip right over, rearward, during a rapid acceleration, particularly a pull away from the stop, when inertial forces morph from nothing to anything – an exponential [and, mathematically, an infinite] change in speed. This doesn’t even consider the fact that securement equipment should be attached to a wheelchair’s frames, not its wheels. And, of course this securement system cannot accommodate a motorized wheelchair.
It would be terrific if transportation evolved to a point where schedules accounted for the time to secure perhaps a single wheelchair (God forbid two) as well as allow the driver to run on schedule while not committing dozens or scores of other safety compromises. But, again, this is not Norway, Japan or many other countries where public transportation systems care about the passengers. To be fair, management and drivers of some modes – particularly schoolbuses – care deeply about the passengers. And to a considerable degree, so do motorcoach officials and staff, and those of limousines and taxis.
Surprisingly, many passenger rail systems – notably AMTRAK – care not at all, and their ignorance and reckless indifferent is as stunning as it is stupid and ignorant. But this is America, where the freedom to kill and maim public transportation passengers, in certain scenarios, is almost open-ended, and accountability often non-existent.
A major reason for most wheelchair tipovers is the vehicle’s running behind schedule – and usually where the schedule is too tight, and multiple safety compromises are committed.
#safetycompromises #wheelchairtipovers #wheelchairandpassengersecurement #transalt #publictransitexpert