As a reader skims through installment after installment about wheelchair tipovers (many more to come after this installment), he or she must be astonished by the magnitude and variety of corruption and waste that public transportation encompasses. And as the episodes have progressed, it is clear that far more money is wasted in public transit, paratransit and non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) service than in other modes like pupil transportation, taxi service, motorcoach service and limousine service – the last three of which require no subsidies.
To place this corruption and waste in perspective, one need only compare transit service in America to its provision in coherent countries (i.e., those with a reasonable distribution of income, a generally accepted, genuine source of truth, and accountability and its enforcement). As an illustration, in 2018 – two years before COVID-19 struck, the fares collected from bus and subway riders in Los Angeles County covered roughly 8.5 percent of a vehicle’s operating costs (and those costs did not include the costs of the vehicle, as the Federal government pays for 80 percent of these). Now, after COVID-19, and after President Trump’s recent ICE troops, usurpation of the State’s National Guard and a small number of marines (about 500) frightened about one-sixth of transit riders away, it would be a fair guess that passenger fares might cover four to five percent (at most) of the system’s operating costs. To place this in perspective, and to help explain why public transportation in the United States is generally a “field day” for civil lawyers whose firms occasionally obtain transportation cases, it should be noted that the percent of operating costs provided by transit riders in Tokyo is 160 percent. There is a big difference between four percent and 160 percent. So it is hardly a surprise that so many American public transit passengers and others are so regularly killed or maimed.
There is an old saying that has been cited far more, in recent years during the Trump Administration, that even a broken clock is correct twice a day. So even those with a persuasion that dislikes or detests a certain political party or its representatives must admit that even someone wrong about almost everything is correct at least once in a while. I have been surprised, and often pleased, when I have agreed with the opinions and deeds of an elected official with whom I disagree with most of the time. But among those concepts I believe current President Trump is correct about is what he calls the “Deep State.” Of course, it would have been helpful if he knew where the Deep State was. So too for Elon Musk, the misconceived phony genius who claimed to know where this Deep State was but clearly had no clue. Regrettably for the field I chose to enter, among the deepest parts of the Deep State lies public transportation. (It is not the money saved by allowing hundreds of thousands of Black people in Africa to starve to death.)
A lifetime in the United States has convinced many that the Deep State also includes Big Pharma and Big Oil. Many U.S. citizens were likely surprised to find out, recently, that much of the corruption in Big Pharma lay in its astonishing overcharging. This phenomenon came to many individuals’ attention when they learned that a certain medication costs roughly $40 a tablet when purchased from a consolidated oligopoly like CVS or Walgreens, while it costs less than a dollar a tablet when purchased from a relatively new drug store chain in Florida. In other words, America’s pharmaceutical oligopolies had been charging more than 40 times as much for the same medication – an overcharge of effectively more than 4000 percent.
But this installment is about wheelchair securement. So with the nation’s worst bus systems covering barely four or five percent of their operating costs from farebox revenue (i.e., what the passengers pay), it is not hard to understand why a 2011 study (by Hall & Associates) found that 73.6% of all wheelchairs transported on transit buses are either improperly (often partly) secured or not secured at all. Personally, I find those results rosy compared to my personal experiences: During the 23 years my office was headquartered in Manhattan, while I rode hundreds of buses – some for personal reasons, others to examine their on-the-street “running time” with the time cited for their travel time on bus schedules (known as “cycle time”), for lawsuits on which I served — I never once saw a wheelchair properly secured. Of course, on the majority of these trips, no wheelchairs were aboard. But that still left me the chance to observe scores of them. Where they secured at all, only the sides of the chairs lying at the edge of the passenger center aisle were secured. And, of course, I am talking about modern equipment to which virtually every type and size of wheelchair can be secured. Because of centrifugal forces:
- When the “aisle-side” of a chair was secured to a chair positioned on the right side (or “curb side” in transportation jargon) of the bus’s interior, if the bus made a moderately sharp turn to the right, the chair would tip over into the passenger aisle to its left.
- In contrast, if this bus made a moderately sharp turn to the left, centrifugal forces would pitch it to the right. When this happened, there was no aisle for the chair to tip over into, as the right side of the chair lay close to the interior wall. So that wheelchair user merely slammed his or her head into the window. Even if a lap and shoulder harness had been secured –securement strikingly rare on a transit bus – this passenger whose chair was secured on the right side of the passenger aisle with his or her chair only secured on the left side – would still smack his or her head into the window.
An important linkage of the Deep State to wheelchair securement and other “safety compromises” (see safetycompromises.com) is that, in the Deep State, where enormous sums of money are stolen or wasted, money is not spent on important things that either do not happen on a daily basis (on every bus) and/or which are covered by insurance – another industry that lied in the Deep State. Particularly on transit buses, where passenger fares cover only a tiny percentage of operating costs, all types and manner of safety compromises are committed:
- Buses make sharp “rolling turns” instead of first coming to a stop or a crawl.
- Buses stop on the wrong side of the intersection (when they might otherwise get “caught in the light” and would be forced to stop on both sides of the intersection).
- Buses fail to “kneel,” and when not pulled close to the curb (or where there is no curb), the distance from the bottom step to the roadway surface is often greater than the passenger expects.
- Buses travel faster than they should (when a lack of traffic – or even when short stretches of roadway permits them to).
- Buses pull away from a bus stop before a passenger who has just boarded has a chance to reach a seat or “point of securement” (a pole or vertical stanchion, or a horizontal stanchion, or the top of a seatbelt – or a handle mounted to one).
- Buses “nose” in – such that the rear door, from which passengers are encouraged to alight – lies (often unexpectedly) too far from the curb.
However, by far, the largest segment of time that a driver can shave off his or her route’s “running time” is the failure to secure a wheelchair, or its occupant into it. This failure is most common on fixed route transit service, paratransit and, particularly, non-emergency medical transportation NEMT) service. In the latter case, the private companies providing the actual service are paid for service only when the vehicle is moving. And with most of these companies financially starved by mostly crooked and/or ignorant brokers, there are considerable incentives to not do things for which one is not going to be paid. In some cases, owners of these companies underbuy, or sabotage securement equipment so that a driver who would normally want to secure a wheelchair, and who was properly taught how to, would not be able to.
Even flitting back and forth between wheelchair securement failures and other negligence and often-deliberate disregard, it is not hard to understand why public transportation – certain modes, as noted, in particular – is part of the Deep State, irrespective of one’s political affiliation or what he or she thinks of an elected official.
Along with industries well-known for gross overcharging and/or corruption – like Big Pharma, and Big Oil and more and more industries consolidated into a small handful of oligopolies – public transportation is clearly a member of the “Deep State.”
#wheelchairandpassengersecurement #wheelchairtipovers #deepstate #publictransitexpert #transalt