Babies vs. wheelchairs

In My Humble Opinion
1

Who would win in a fight? UFC rules. Nah, just yanking your chain. Inspired by a court case in the UK - on who has priority on a bus.

“In February 2012, wheelchair user Doug Paulley was not allowed to board a bus in Leeds because the wheelchair space was taken by a pushchair. The mother, not wanting to wake her sleeping baby, refused to move.”

Jesus Christ, what a selfish cow. Move your baby lady, yeah it might cry but what’s that poor sod meant to do? Engage his wheelchair jetpack instead of using the bus?

I normally don’t give my opinion in the OP as I think it colours things too much, but I can’t see myself backing down on how goddamn stupid it is that it’s even reached the level of court case when the answer is so obvious. I’d love to hear any reasonable justifications for the opposite viewpoint.

2

But isn’t a pushchair really a wheelchair for babies? No, it’s not. I cannot imagine you will have much debate there.

The law states only that the bus must provide accommodation wheelchairs. I believe the court case is deciding whether the driver of the bus must, by law, force another patron out of a seat in order to make room for a wheelchair. This would not only make them responsible for providing the space, but also policing its use. Providers of handicap parking spaces generally have no such onus.

3

I’m sincerely hoping this turns out to be the most one-sided poll result in SMDB history. What a horrible woman.

4

Wheelchair should win, of course. A crying baby is far less of an inconvenience than being paralyzed.

5

Won’t somebody please think of the children!

OK, thanks. Now move them out of the way so the guy in the wheelchair can get on the bus.

6

I’m hoping everyone agrees with me, first step on the road to world domi…er, I mean exposing the issue.

Yeah, this is what the bus company says;
*"Please note that the driver has no power to compel passengers to move in this way and is reliant upon the goodwill of the passengers concerned.

Unfortunately, if a fellow passenger refuses to move you will need to wait for the next bus."*
The last bit I think is complete bullshit on toast, hopefully the court ruling with be if the wheelchair user needs it, shift your ass. Although I can’t believe that this policy wasn’t already in place. What’s the point of having the space if you’re not able to police its use against jackassery?

7

Of course wheelchair guy gets priority (and I say that as someone who currently spends a fair amount of time pushing a buggy). I have the option of taking my kid out of the buggy and folding the buggy, or of putting her in a carrier instead of using the buggy to begin with. Both of those options can be a big pain in the ass, depending on the circumstances, but the point is, they *are *options. The guy in the wheelchair doesn’t have them. So he gets first dibs.

8

The only ambiguity I see (feel free to call BS if I’m talking shite) is if the wheelchair user has one of those collapsible wheelchairs and is willing and able to instead collapse the chair and use a seat, if the baby has one of those prams (what do you call them in the state? Wiki says baby carriage) that doesn’t collapse, then I think a common sense approach would allow both to use the bus.

Of course if the wheelchair user isn’t willing then of course it should default to their side and the pram user left to ponder maybe getting a foldable one for bus usage in the future.

9

I have had a crying baby, and I have had to use really lousy public transportation. A crying baby is less of a problem than having to wait an hour for the next bus, which apparently isn’t an express, or something, and requires a longer ride and a transfer. In England, where it is probably raining.

Also, FWIW, I can’t speak for every jurisdiction in the US, and this will vary by metropolitan transit areas (counties and cities, tri-city areas, whatever), but in at least some places, drivers have the power to make people move out of the handicapped seats. When my husband first got back from Iraq, he had trouble finding a good job, so he worked for a temp agency, and got a job driving a bus for a while, before he finally got a good job working in a lab. He had to police to handicapped spaces-- but it mostly consisted of seeing someone in a wheelchair at a stop up ahead, and turning around and telling anyone who had stuff in the way to move it. No one ever complained-- in fact, people using the space usually weren’t aware it was the wheelchair spot, and acted kind of embarrassed that they had put something there.

Opposite the wheelchair space (which had a lockdown), there was a row of seats reserved for people with limited mobility. It’s my observation that in the US, people who don’t need those seats never use them unless they are the only seats left, and are very good about giving them up if someone gets on who needs one.

People are like that with handicapped restroom stalls, too. People who don’t need them don’t use them unless nothing else is available.

I can see why drivers who were hired with the understanding that policing the seats wasn’t their job don’t want it thrust on them, but this will get a lot of press, probably, and people will know not to take the spots unless they are prepared to give them up. In any event, new drivers will take the job knowing they have to police the seats.

10

Wheelchair! Hands down. That’s ridiculous.

11

We call them all strollers. Most of them collapse to one degree or another. The most collapsable kind are called umbrella strollers, as they fold so small as to take up not much more space than a large golf umbrella. There are a few strollers that don’t collapse at all, thanks to the hipster love of old fashioned things that are beautiful but impractical, but IMHO anyone taking them on a bus is an asshole. Those we might call “baby carriages”, as it’s an old fashioned name for an old fashioned item. But you could still call it a stroller.

While I’m almost entirely on the side of the person with the wheelchair, there is a bit of compassion for a hypothetical mum who has been out with an overtired tot who hasn’t slept in a week and finally nodded off, or who is one of those overpackers with items stuffed in every nook and cranny of the stroller, which would all take up excess room and cause a significant delay while she unpacked the thing to fold it. If that was what was happening, the bus could potentially be held up long enough for the next bus to arrive, anyhow. So I don’t see the net benefit in forcing that to happen, causing 30 people to have to wait instead of one. But our buses come every 10 minutes, on average. If it’s an hour wait, that’s a different story, as it’s a much higher level of inconvenience.

But in all likelihood, what we have is a person who would be slightly, not horribly, inconvenienced in order to prevent another person from being rather much more inconvenienced (by waiting for another bus), and I’m generally in favor of people making small sacrifices to prevent greater ones. Fold the f’ing stoller and enjoy some time cuddling your baby.

12

I don’t think anyone on the board is going to say “The baby!” The question really is, can the woman with the stroller be an asshole, or can the driver have the power to tell her to move or get off the bus? Right now, the situation is that the space is “for” wheelchairs, in that it was designed for them, and put on the buses in conjunction with the lifts after demands and protests by the disabled community, so there’s no question that in some existential way it is “the handicapped spot.”

But what is the solution when it is occupied by a non-disabled person, and someone in a wheelchair boards? Is it that common for people to park strollers there? maybe the buses need to have more space on them for both strollers and wheelchairs. Maybe there needs to be a system so that the driver has back-up when he tells someone to move. There needs to be at the very least a sign over the space warning people other than wheelchairs users that they can use the space as long as no one in a wheelchair needs it, but if someone in a wheelchair boards the bus, the person with the stroller, or big package, or whatever, will have to move, and the driver has the power to eject anyone who argues. And the driver needs to be able to radio for a supervisor if anyone becomes belligerent and holds up the bus. The driver can’t be there hanging on his own with one, and then probably two irate (and eventually more) passengers.

I wonder about the other people on the bus. If I’d been on that bus, I would have told that woman to move, and if the bus were full, but I had a seat, I would have offered her mine. I always offer my seat to anyone with a baby or small child, and I have a bad back, so standing isn’t all that comfortable. But I also say things to people who do crap like not move out of the designated wheelchair seat.

13

UK–>US. A “baby carriage” was a thing on four wheels where a baby not old enough to sit up could lie down, and it had a hood.This is what they looked like in the 1960s. When car seats became law all over the US, in the late 1980s, or early 1990s, manufacturers got the idea to make car seat-stroller combinations, so that the car seat came out of the car and functioned as a baby carrier, and fitted onto the stroller for a baby not old enough to sit up, and the carriage became obsolete. When the baby can sit up, you leave the car seat in the car, and put the baby directly in the stroller. The stroller folds flat, and is pretty easy to store, but the car seat doesn’t fold. If you had a baby in just a stroller (and you could easily have a five-month-old in one) you could fold it up and put it to the side, but if you had a tiny baby in a car seat on a stroller, you’d still have the non-folding car seat to deal with.

If the bus was crowded, and there were no other seats, and no one got up to offer the woman a seat, she may have been stuck if she had a car seat on a stroller, but since she complained about waking the baby, and not about having no where to go and having to get off the bus herself, I’d say that the latter was not the situation.

14

As the father of a baby who has used the bus with a pushchair, and the baby likes to sleep in the pushchair (albeit we are blessed in that we don’t usually have too many issues with getting him off to sleep), the wheelchair user absolutely gets priority.

Tangential but relevant story - the other day I was getting the bus to work, by myself. The bus was busy, such that every double seat was either partly or fully occupied, but not full. Also note that this was not a peak travel time for work as I was on a later shift. A lady with a pushchair boarded the bus (no wheelchairs involved), and both pushchair/wheelchair spaces were occupied by people sitting in the pull-down seats. On one side we had an elderly lady with a shopping bag on wheels/walker, and a older gentleman with a crutch. On the other there was a young man, probably no older than 20, who appeared to be able-bodied. Despite it being entirely obvious that the pushchair needed space, he sat motionless and watched while the man with the crutch moved from his seat and the lady shuffled her walker out of the way, so the mum could park the pushchair. I so nearly spoke up, but then I wondered if the young man perhaps had some kind of autism (or other social anxiety) whereby it would have caused him extreme distress to sit right next to a stranger. But it’s more likely that this was pure self-centredness, I think. I wish I had asked him politely to move.

15

Yeah, if the wheelchair user has the option of collapsing the chair and using a seat, while the parent doesn’t, then he should do it - both people being able to use the bus is better than only one. But he still has first dibs.

I didn’t even know you could still get buggies that don’t collapse.

16

Yep. But only if you’re prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of money on it. Amazon.com : Silver Cross Balmoral Pram - Navy : Baby Strollers : Baby

(Okay, that one of the more expensive, even in this ridiculously priced luxury market. They also sell some for a mere $1800. But hey, free shipping! Such a deal.)

17

I don’t know about other parts of the UK, but where I live the areas are marked as being for either pushchairs or wheelchairs, so I wouldn’t expect the parent to move. What are people expecting anyway, the parent to get of the bus to make way for the person in the wheelchair? There’s not going to be space, at least on a busy bus, to put the pushchair anywhere else.

18

As someone who has worked extensively with people with autism, if that was the reason he didn’t move, it was more likely he simply didn’t pick up on the cues that moving was necessary. If he was high-functioning enough to be out on his own, he probably would have appreciated the tip. People with certain kinds of high-functioning autism just don’t pick up on social cues, and need to learn such things by rote. Fortunately, if you are not overtly hostile and use neutral language, they aren’t usually insulted by suggestions like “Why don’t you take another seat so that the woman with the stroller can use yours, since it folds?”

It’s also possible that he isn’t from around there, or doesn’t ride the bus often, and if the seat was down when he got there, he didn’t realize he was taking up a seat someone else needed.

In other words, I can think of enough reasons for him simply to be clueless rather than rude, that he might appreciate being clued in, and that he wasn’t a jerk, and the situation wouldn’t be confrontational as long as you used neutral language.

I remember once I was riding a bus with a friend when we were both about 13. A woman with a toddler, a diaper bag, and some other kind of package, got on the bus. I immediately got up and offered her my seat, as I was right in front, and my friend looked puzzled for a moment-- we were both capable of standing, but there were probably some seats at the back, albeit not together. Then after she thought a moment, she got up so the woman had room for her stuff as well, if she put the toddler on her lap. I just thought “Why should she struggle to the back of the bus, and probably whack someone with the diaper bag?” It’s what my family taught me. My friend, I guess, had never been explicitly taught that, but she got it as soon as she saw me do it.

I’m glad we had a car when my son was a baby.

Yeah. People who can afford those can probably afford a car.

19

:eek: Holy Jaysus. Is it at least rocket-propelled?

20

Hipsters buy them. Same kind of people like some guy I know who was asking if he could buy a vintage car-- and he meant like a 1930s roadster, not a 1970s Mustang, and then have an entire modern engine and exhaust system put in it, because he liked to look of the old cars, but he wanted it to be gas efficient, and pollute as little as possible. I’m surprised he didn’t ask if he could have airbags installed. :here’s the roll-eyes smiley, if we had the good one: