Let's change those "priority seat" signs on public transport.

The BBQ Pit
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Here’s a nice photo of poor helpless disabled people speaking up and demanding their right to easy access to public transportation. Look at their swollen and painful hands. And I bet there were able-bodied people who said “I encourage you to stand up for your rights!” How dare those people say that! People with disabilities should sit at home and do nothing to help themselves, don’t you think?

Gosh, you might as well say they shouldn’t even go to work! Why didn’t you tell SciFiFan that her hands are too swollen and painful to even go to work at all? Why not offer that solution to her - just stay home! It would fit your “don’t expect those with swollen and painful hands to do anything for themselves” philosophy, after all.

182

Dude, seriously. There is something very wrong with you.

183

No there isn’t.

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Wow, this feels like the BBQ pit…oh, wait…

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I admit I haven’t read all of your posts in this thread, but of the ones I have read, none have contained suggestions that indicate that you understand what it is like to live with chronic pain. I’m amazed she is still working, much less riding the tube. I think you should just leave her alone.

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My bolding: It’s Sam not** Fan**. SciFiSam.

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I’m quite familiar with advocacy efforts by and on behalf of people with disabilities, women (battered and otherwise) and very hungry if not starving children (who can and do advocate for themselves), as well as with international human rights law pertaining to same. I have a great deal of professional expertise with the more unruly forms of political activism undertaken, historically and today, by poor, excluded, and marginalized groups of people–your revolutions, rebellions, acts of civil disobedience, land invasions, building occupations, highway blockades, and sackings of the municipal archives.

If I remember correctly, your credentials include having a child with Down Syndrome and your advocacy on your child’s behalf is certainly admirable. I do not have a child with that kind of disability, although mine is in need of a great deal of a different sort of advocacy.

What I do have is empathy, an excellent understanding of words on their own and in various combinations, and the ability to detect tone and emotion in written forms of communication without the aid of emoticons. Therefore I do not respond to pain and frustration with admonishments of activism, nor do I claim to be cheering a person on when I am clearly adding to their frustration.

I lack the overriding desire to prove myself right about other people’s feelings, experiences, opinions, and activities. I have come to understand that you simply can’t understand why you irritate and anger people so frequently and so easily, which is a very great social disability for which there are no priority seats, reachable or otherwise by those who need them.

I suspect the OP would rather that this thread die an inglorious death, so I’ll bow out, leaving you to bask in your certainties.

188

The only thing I wanted to add was this, a map of the lifts at King’s Cross station, applying only to the underground, not the overground trains or the station itself:

http://img.tapatalk.com/d/14/03/27/ureny2up.jpg

The walks between the lifts are incredibly long. They are much longer than the walks to the stairs, which take quite a while anyway. It is a terrible system.

This is an upgrade done in the last few years. It was done under the DDA and with the advice of disability advocacy groups. However, it was also done on a system that was built over 100 years ago. King’s Cross is such a major station that shutting it down entirely would be economically catastrophic. Just doing these changes required shutting down certain lines for years at least at weekends.

Other stations are undergoing similar upgrades that will have similar “access.” And the tunnels themselves can’t be changed, which further limits any changes to the trains.

Some lines now have wider doors on the trains and flip-down seats, and they are a definite improvement in that people in wheelchairs might be able to use them (if they can get into the station) and parents with buggies can too. I can’t flip the seats down myself but I am happy to ask for help to do so if I actually get to one. My usual line doesn’t have them and I doubt it ever will - most of the stations are completely inaccessible, anyway.

We’re working with a completely antiqued system and the only way to help disabled people is to keep an eye out and offer a seat. Asking for one is sometimes physically impossible and always horrendously embarrassing.

If you’re not sure about the embarrassing part, consider how different it is to ask for help for someone else than for yourself (the former is much easier), and ask for it for yourself, and consider doing it to unpaid strangers on a regular basis.

But also remember the physically impossible part. If you see someone stagger onto the tube and then semi-crouch against the door, but not make their way to the seats, that could well be because the train starts moving within seconds and they can’t walk to the seats, and it’s so loud that asking for a seat would require yelling at people, and then there’s the time spent waiting till the train had stopped before actually walking to the seat.

So if you just got on before them so can run to a seat, you could offer it to them. This is what my GF does when we travel together - because the priority seats in reality go to those who can run fastest, she runs for one then calls me over.

When I was able-bodied, I always used to take the priority seats over any other seats because I knew I’d give them up; I’d glance up and check if anyone entering the train looked like they needed the seat more than me. My disability is actually quite visible when I’m walking and I’m certain I would have noticed someone like me and given up my seat.

FWIW, the reason I was so careful was possibly because one of my brothers was disabled and I was involved in a lot of disability advocacy stuff in my youth. That stuff isn’t new to me.