And that meant that those who designed the CTA thought that disabled people like me never could or should use it. But if my neighbors who weren’t wheelchair users wanted to go somewhere, all they had to do was wait at the bus stop. It meant that if I wanted to go somewhere, I either had to spend a lot of money purchasing a vehicle and adapting it to be accessible, spend a lot of money hiring an accessible vehicle such as a med-i-car, to take me there or just forget about it and not go. Thus, I was mad at myself that I wasn’t as mad a lot sooner as I was now about what the inaccessibility of that public facility meant. I now saw them as an essential public facility as much as city hall or the library. Hearing about the exploits of Denver ADAPT forever changed my perspective on those green buses that passed my house daily. I attended the meeting because I was mad. When he returned, he called a meeting for the purpose of organizing a local chapter of ADAPT. Right around that same time, a man from Chicago named Kent Jones, who used a wheelchair, went to Denver to attend an ADAPT organizing training for people from around the country. And sometimes ADAPTers even got arrested for protesting like that. The protesters wouldn’t move for several hours so the bus couldn’t move either. There were public transit buses with wheelchair lifts in operation in Denver mostly because ADAPT organized aggressive protests where people in wheelchairs did things like surround inaccessible buses that were on the street waiting at intersections. Come about 1983 or so, I began hearing word-of-mouth tales from other disabled folks about a group of disabled activists in Denver, Colorado who called themselves American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation (ADAPT). The house was on a main street and a green CTA bus passed by several times a day. I graduated from college in 1978 and I was living with my mother and sister in the house in which I was raised. To give people today some context on that situation, I ask people to imagine that the entire CTA system is suddenly and indefinitely shut down! How would that impact their lives? How would they get around? How isolated, abandoned and angry would they feel? ![]() ![]() It was as if the CTA system didn’t even exist. You can imagine how frustrating that was for anyone who didn’t have the physical ability to board CTA buses. But without any federal mandate like that, there wasn’t a single accessible bus in the street fleet of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). The ADA requires that all public transit buses put into service must be wheelchair accessible. I say to myself, “What the hell is this? I thought those inaccessible buses were long gone!”Īnd then I wake up and realize it was just a bad dream.īut that’s how things were in Chicago prior to 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. ![]() So in my nightmare, I’m mad as a hornet when I see the green bus go by. They’re painted white, red and blue and inside the front door is a ramp that flips out onto the curb when the driver flips a switch so a wheelchair user can roll right in. The public transit buses in Chicago are much different today. Every once in a while, I have what I call a “green-bus nightmare”: I’m out and about and all of a sudden, a public transit bus goes by and it’s painted green and there are three big steps inside the front door - so it’s inaccessible as hell for someone who uses a wheelchair, like me.
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