Finding room on buses as a wheelchair user is an age-old problem. Well, I say age-old. It’s a problem that has existed for about as long as buses have been accessible. I could boringly recount to you again how long it took Emma and I to get a bus home from Liverpool after the 2005 Champions League victory parade but I won’t because this column is about accessibility and not the validity of the penalty that eventually levelled the scores at 3-3 when Xabi Alonso knocked in the rebound from his own botched spot-kick. And that is surely where we would end up if I started riffing on the subject of 2005 and its European Cup Final.
Happily since then accessible buses have become a much more common sight, but space within those accessible buses is still scarce. There are times when the seats which fold up to create space for a wheelchair are taken. Quite often the driver will humiliate you by asking the person occupying the seat if they wouldn’t mind shifting their clearly non-disabled arse to another part of the bus to make some room for you. But if that doesn’t happen then as the wheelchair user you are left to either squeeze in wherever you can fit or else risk the wrath of your salt of the earth community by asking someone to make way for you. There is a reason why disabled people and parents with prams don’t get on. It’s a war zone out there. The modern update on Ben Elton’s famous double-seat stand-up routine.
To combat this the good-to-middling brains of Nottingham have come up with a badge scheme. There are two types of badge aimed at addressing the issue. One is for the non-disabled to wear which carries a message that they are ‘happy to move for you’ when they are occupying an accessible seat, and the other is for the disabled person to wear which rather mortifyingly asks ‘please offer me a seat’ if there aren’t any free. You are way ahead of me if you have spotted that wheelchair users already have a seat. It is a space we require. Semantics are important, but maybe this is more for those who have no need for a wheelchair but who have enough mobility problems to make clambering to the one empty seat at the back of the bus a problem. Yer nana for example.
The thing is that the wearing of badges has arguably as much of a negative stereotype attached to it as the use of wheelchairs or walking aids. For me it conjures up images of schoolchildren who have just managed to swim 25 metres in their local pool for the first time, boy scouts who have learned to tie 740 different varieties of knot, or loud centre of attention juveniles who want everyone to be made indisputably aware that ‘I AM 10!’. Adults don’t tend to wear badges, apart from that Portsmouth fan that Sky Sports were so fond of when Pompey were in the Premier League.
Despite my reservations the move has been met with a mostly positive response from disability campaigners, though they did point out that the need for people to wear portable requests for common courtesy on their apparel is ‘sad’. What baffles me about it is that in 2019 we have decided not to tackle the problem by designing transport with more accessible features staffed by people with a keener sense of how to make sure there is room for everyone, but instead to develop a way of making disabled people look like victims. Or to make the non-disabled stand out for offering a simple slice of decency. Badges are an acute embarrassment to me, but they are a source of pride and indicator of achievement to others. Vacating a seat that you should not really be using in the first place is not an achievement. It is not your 25 metre swimming badge.
Fortunately I drive so I will have little cause for wearing any kind of badge on my travels, except on the increasingly rare occasions I go out drinking. My most regular beef is not with accessible seat botherers (though they are villainous) but with drivers who continually use disabled bays without ownership of a badge that is anything approaching blue. One such little dweeb was on Twitter recently boasting that he arrived at his local supermarket at 5.30 in the morning and decided that it would be fine to park illegally in a disabled bay. The logic here was that there are 30 disabled bays and that the chances of 30 people who need disabled spaces turning up at 5.30am is low.
There are obvious reasons why this is wrong including the mind-blowing concept that he has failed to grasp of disabilities that you cannot necessarily see. But the biggest reason is that it assumes that disabled people don’t need to be going to certain places at certain times. It is still generally accepted by able bodied society that it is ok to make disabled people book assistance 24 hours in advance to use a train because after all, nobody who has a disability will ever need to go anywhere on a whim, will they? Assistance, by the way, can be defined as one member of staff plonking a portable ramp down on the ground so that you can board the train from platform level. If they didn’t lock them all up on station walls or on trains then you could probably pick the fucking thing up and do it yourself.
Again though, this is society deciding what is best for us. They lock them up on walls and on trains for the same reasons that they lock disabled access toilets. Namely that the general public can’t be trusted not to vandalise and ruin them if they are easily accessible. This fear may be real, but its effect is to rob us of our independence. I would happily piss into a broken toilet if it was a choice between that and having to ask Miss behind the bar if I can go to the little boys room. Many of us have radar keys but again the onus is on us to acquire them to make facilities genuinely accessible. If you are wondering, the official line on radar keys is that they will set you back £4.50. This is not a lot of money but if you lose them at the rate that I do then it all adds up. This is a tax on my bladder and nothing else.
Maybe one day in public places in Nottingham you’ll be able to get a badge that says ‘I need a wee’.
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