💾 Archived View for tilde.pink › ~racoon › places › carfree › disability.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 05:27:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Disabled people have a wide range of needs.
Some of these needs conflict with a car-centric society, and make
existing in a car-centric society unsafe. Other disabled people have
a car as their lifeline.
Pedestrianization of cities has become increasingly popular in recent
years. This reduces noise (which improves the mental health of people
and wildlife), improves safety (including for children and people with
vision problems), and improves the people's health by reducing
pollution and making walking more enjoyable.
How can we avoid excluding people?
Could be made available through normal bicycle-hiring schemes:
for carrying shopping. They allow people who struggle to lift to
carry large, heavy objects over long distances on foot.
hands, cargo bikes, and more.
Aging populations have adapted to car-centric areas in North America
by using golf carts - this is interesting:
in the surrounding area, including the driver.
safety for cyclists and walkers, and reduce space required for parking,
which allows more space for people, trees, and wildlife.
you encourage more empathy and a sense of community.
Electric scooter hiring schemes are increasingly popular in cities,
but they aren't exactly non-controversial, since they commonly clutter
pavements, people ride them unsafely, and so on.
However, they're useful for people who find walking difficult,
but not impossible.
How do we make things widely available, but prevent misuse?
Making services "only available to Acutally Disabled people"
(means testing) comes with its own set of problems.
It's common for disabled people to slip through cracks when access to care
requires navigating a system. This can be due to a lack of assistance or
due to the system simply not being built to cover every single possible set
of requirements and needs.
In the places where medical cannabis is available, it's commonly heavily
restricted, which leads to disabled people (with chronic pain, anxiety,
or other problems) who fail to successfully navigate the system to break
the law.
Universal legalization (with harm reduction information widely available)
allows it to benefit more people.
In the case of mobility, it's difficult to fully evaluate if someone
"needs" a car. Tradespeople often need trade vehicles, but the average
person doesn't need an articulated truck, and if they had one, the
streets would be more horrible for everyone. It makes sense to restrict
fast, heavy vehicles and allow widespread use of slow, lightweight vehicles.
Most people are taught not to lie, and there is also a certain stigma
attached to accessing services "for disabled people".
A theoretical system for distributing lightweight vehicles for use on that
day should be community-led - engineers without an enforcement background
can help users and fix problems when things inevitably break.
If they suspect a lightweight vehicle or electric scooter is going
to be misused, or supply is limited, questions like "are you exhausted?
do you have something heavy to move? are you finding it difficult to walk?"
make sense. There's no need to require disabled ID.
There is also the inherent truth that making a service useful to able-bodied
people means that a larger number people have a stake in the service being
high quality.