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Home / Albums / Los Angeles, Fall 1985 23
Post date / 2016 / Week 2
ADAPT (205)
[Headline] NAT HENTOFF:“No Wonder God Punished Her by Making Her Blind!” Village Voice, March 18, 1986, page unknown. PHOTO in center of page. Photo credit, DAVID STONE/MAINSTREAM: MAGAZINE OF THE ABLE-DISABLED: A group of police officers in dark short sleeved uniforms standing and looking at one another. On the floor at their feet, a man in white clothes (Chris Hronis) lies on his side arms behind his back, apparently handcuffed. Through the legs of the officers you can see someone else (Edith Harris) sitting on the floor also apparently handcuffed. At the edges of the frame you can see a couple of people's faces and at the bottom, the back of someone's head. Above the picture is a text box that reads: "I am tired of being closed away." Photo Caption reads: Disabled activists commit civil disobedience in Las Angeles to make public transit accessible: “We will ride." [Italicized] New vocabulary must be developed. Racism and sexism are words known to every schoolchild, but there is no word to describe bigotry against persons with disabilities. [End italicized] – Lisa Blumberg, Hartford Courant, June 24, I985 [Italicized]... it is absolutely essential to understand that the pain and "tragedy" of living with a disability in our culture, such as it is, derives primarily from the pain and humiliation of discrimination, oppression, and anti-disability attitudes, not from the disability itself. [End italicized] — Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch, Carasa News, Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse, June/July 1984 [Italicized] Public transportation is a tax-supported system. The handicapped pay taxes. It's as simple as that. How would the average taxpayer feel if he was denied access to a facility he paid for? [End italicized] – Wade Blank, a founder of and organizer for ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation), Denver Post, October 6, 1985 In the spring of 1982, a woman in a wheelchair went into a clothing store in the Bronx and was told by the guard that he was required by store policy to turn away people with wheelchairs. Shs wrote a letter of complaint to the head of the chain and received an apology, along with a $50 gift certificate. Off she went to cash in the certificate, and guess what happened? That's right. A guard turned her away from the store. The woman sued; the store settled the case by giving her a check for $10,300. I had been about to write that a disabled lawyer had handled her case, but he — Kipp Elliott Watson—corrected me. “I am a lawyer with a disability," he said. In Jim Johnson's "Shop 'Talk" column in the February 22, 1986, Editor & Publisher, there is a guide for copy editors and reporters concerning accuracy of language in stories about those with disabilities. It was put together by more than 50 national disability organizations. One illustration: “Perhaps the most offensive term to disabled people is ‘wheelchair-bound' or ‘confined to a wheelchair.’ Disabled people don't sleep in their wheelchairs, they sleep in bed. Call them 'wheelchair users.'" Also, "labeling of groups should be avoided. Say ‘people who are deaf' or 'people with arthritis’ rather than ‘the deaf' or ‘the arthritic.’ . . . One of the problems with eliminating insensitive terms is the, lack of a clear policy that reporters and editors can follow. A reporter cannot change a paper's policy by himself. The first time a reporter writes 'person who is arthritic,’ a copy editor is sure to change it to ‘an arthritic’ to save words.” And I would particularly recommend the next correction to the vast majority of the reporters and editorial writers who have covered Baby Doe cases: “Afflicted [unintelligible] a negative term that suggests hopelessness. Use disabled. Also to be avoided are deformed and invalid." The guide is especially useful because more and more of those with disabilities are going to be making news-in–lawsuits, individual acts of resistance against discrimination, and in collective demonstrations. For instance, in Los Angeles last October, during a nonviolent direct-action protest against the American Public Transit Association (which is resisting making all its buses accessible to the handicapped), there was this report by George Stein in the October 7 Los Angeles-Times: “During the procession, 131 wheelchairs, stretching more than a block, carried people with disabilities ranging from spina bifida, cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophy to snapped spinal cords, congenital defects and post-polio paralysis. “Many had the withered limbs and lack of body control that the more fortunate usually try not to stare at. “But not Sunday. Motorists slowed to watch the sight. Some honked in support. One of the demonstrators was Bob Kafka, a spokesman for ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) "This is beautiful,” Kafka said as he wheeled along “I am tired of being closed away." Carolyn Earl, who uses a wheelchair, tried to make a reservation at the Harrison Hotel in Oakland, California. The clerk wouldn't take an advance deposit. Suppose there's a fire, he said. The hotel would be liable. But call back, he said. She did. Ain't that a shame, there are no rooms with baths, and she'd asked for a room with a bath. Okay, the woman said, I’ll take a room without a bath. The clerk said that for her, there were no rooms, period. Just like it used to be with blacks and Jews. It happens, however, that according to Section 54.1 of California's Civil Code, it is as unlawful to discriminate in public accommodations against people with disabilities as it is to exclude racial and ethnic minorities. Carolyn Earl went to court. In December 1984, the hotel agreed to pay her damages and to sign an agreement pledging never again to refuse lodging to anyone who is disabled. In Louisville last fall, Steve and Nadine Jacobson, who are blind, were on trial. The charge: disorderly conduct. On July 7, they had been sitting in exit-row seats on United Airlines Flight 869 to Minneapolis, where they live. Airline personnel and security employees from Standford airport ordered the Jacobsons to get out of those seats. In the event of an emergency, the Jacobsons were told, they, being blind, could jeopardize their own safety and that of others. The rationale for the policy, it came out at the trial, was a “test” some time back during which – now get this – sighted people were blindfolded two hours before a mock evacuation and it turned out that these “blind” people had trouble opening emergency exit doors as well as dealing with other evacuation procedures. On the basis of a test that used fake blind people to find out how real blind people might act, the Federal Aviation Administration—long known for its stunning brilliance—issued an advisory circular suggesting to airlines that they keep blind folks out of those emergency exit rows. As they were trying to get the Jacobsons to move, United Airlines personnel kept insisting that a "Federal regulation" said they had to get out of those seats. The Jacobsons, however, had just come from a convention at which that very advisory circular had been discussed. They knew there was no rule. And so they sat. And sat. Irritated passengers offered to trade seats with them. Another yelled that the Jacobsons were holding everybody else up. "How can you be so selfish?" And another, speaking from the heart, pointed to Nadine Jacobson, and said to a neighbor: “No wonder God punished her by making her blind!" Eventually, the Jacobsons were removed from the plane and charged with disorderly conduct—not with violating the alleged “Federal regulation." At the trial, Steve Jacobson told the jury: “All through my life, there were things I was told I couldn't do because I was blind. In college, they said I couldn't take math." (Mr. Jacobson is a computer analyst for 3M.) He went on to say that he kept ignoring all the advice about all the things he couldn't do because he was blind. “I just had to go on," he said. Where he works, he was told not to use the escalator. He could get hurt. He uses the escalator. That day at the airport, “To move from my seat would reinforce all that I've worked not to have happen. To move would say to the other people on the plane that I am less capable than any sighted person to open that emergency door. And that isn't. the case. It just isn't.” As for Nadine Jacobson: “I was scared. I had never been arrested before. I felt really bad that people were angry and upset, and that the plane was being delayed." But still she wouldn't move. “Many times people make assumptions about what we [blind people] can do and can't do. I knew that if I moved from that seat, everyone would think that anyone else was more competent than me. It's an issue of self-respect. I'm a citizen of this country, and a blind person, and I feel I have a right to travel in this country, and if I get assigned a seat, I have a right to sit there." Would the jury have been convinced solely by what the Jacobsons said? I don't know. But I expect they listened with much interest to testimony by Mark D. Warriner of Frontier Airlines, who said his company had stopped discriminating against blind people as a result of a March 1985 evacuation drill by World Airways, which showed that blind people—real blind people—got out during an emergency faster than sighted passengers. The Jacobsons were acquitted. The verdict, said Nadine Jacobson, was “a step forward for blind people all over the country." Footnote: None of the police officers or the security personnel involved in arresting the Jacobsons would give them their names. Without the names, the Jacobsons could never identify them, ho-ho. But an attorney sitting in front of the Jacobsons on the plane handed them a piece of paper with one of the names, and that led to others being revealed. The stories about the Jacobsona and the woman trying to get a hotel room originally appeared in The Disability Rag in somewhat different form. There is nothing like that paper in the whole country. It covers the whole disability rights spectrum—from what‘s happening in the courts to the directions being taken by groups of nonviolent resisters. It publishes memoirs, jeremiads, parodies, and material for which there is no category. It is the liveliest publication I know. It has grace and beauty and fury. It costs $9 a year, from The Disability Rag, Box 145, Louisville, Kentucky 40201. You have a choice of print, cassette tape, or large-print edition. We shall be getting back to public transit, along with education, jobs, and stereotypes of people with disabilities in movies and television as well as in print. The importance of access to buses and other forms of transit has been distilled by Wade Blank of ADAPT: “Jobs and education don't mean much if you can't get a bus to take you there. Accessibility to public transportation—moving from one place to another—should be a right, not just a consumer service." Recently, Wade Blank was telling me how, because of ADAPT and the pressure it keeps putting on, 78 per cent of the buses in Denver, where ADAPT is based, are now accessible. Soon, with 200 new buses on order, all of them with lifts, people with disabilities will be able to ride 90 per cent of the Denver buses. Already, Blank said, this access means a lot. “I know a man with cerebral palsy," Blank continued. “He has no use of his legs or arms. He can't speak. But now, with the buses accessible, he can ride around and see the sights and come to our offices. He can move where and when he wants to in the Denver community." He's no longer closed away. In Dallas, Kataryn Thomas, 57, was arrested last month during an ADAPT demonstration against the recalcitrant Dallas Area Rapid Transit Authority. She was born with spina bifida, uses a wheelchair, has worked as a receptionist, and when she was busted, a bright orange flag connected to the back of her chair fluttered in the breeze. The words on it were: “Free Spirit." “l don't have to climb any mountains," Kataryn Thomas told the Dallas Times Herald. “I just want to ride the public transit.”
ADAPT (206)
Village Voice, March 4, 1986, p.27 [Headline] NAT HENTOFF: America’s Apartheid [This was part of a series of articles Mr. Hentoff wrote for the Village Voice on disability issues and people with disabilities in our society.] PHOTO in center of page, Photo credit Michael Rondou / Press - Telegram: A slight man (Bobby Hartwell) in a somewhat rickety manual wheelchair sits in front of a large city bus [number 4405]. Through the windsheild a very beefy uniformed man, perhaps the driver, stands arms resting in front of him. Behind and to the side of this first bus is a group of three police men standing and conferring. Behind them a couple of other wheelchair riders are blocking a second bus. Behind that bus a third is barely visable. Text box above the photo: “Anatomy is not destiny and never has been.” The photo caption: A demonstrator holds a bus hostage In Long Beach, California: Because of the way the bus is built, the demonstrator can't get on. [Italicized] A “caste” of. . . persons has been created [in America]. Members suffer a stigma of abnormality, inferiority, and dependency, are provided with separate facilities and programs, and are encouraged to interact only with others of the same caste. [Italicized ends] —Robert Funk, Director/Attorney, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Inc. [Italicized] Black people started a movement when they were forced to sit in the backs of buses. We're not even allowed on the buses. [Italicized ends] – Julie Haraskin, during a nonviolent direct-action demonstration in Los Angeles by ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit) Barry Giddings is a citizen of the United States who lives in Philadelphia. In 1981, he was shot in the neck and became a quadriplegic. The only way he can get around is in a wheelchair. Until December 10, 1985, he and his brother lived in his mother's home. On that day, Mrs. Giddings and her family were evicted. She went to Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services to get shelter for herself and her sons. Mrs. Giddings was told that she and her nondisabled son would be provided shelter, but Barry Giddings would have to provide for himself. Why? Because he was disabled. The apparatchiks tried to make Mrs. Giddings understand that they had no choice in this matter. Taking care of her disabled son's needs, they explained, would cost more money than was being spent on the average homeless soul in the city's shelters. Then there were the costs of additional insurance premiums to cover the city if this quadriplegic were taken in. Then where should he go? Was this man to be thrown out into the street to lie there until he died? Not our problem, said Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services. Lest you think that the decision to wholly abandon this disabled man was made by some low-level employee devoted to the increasingly popular notion that inconvenient people should be terminated, the person who sent Barry Giddings into the night was following the policy of Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services. A relative arranged to have Giddings taken into Jefferson Hospital for the night because the staff there, unlike the folks at Adult Services, could not bear leaving him without shelter. They put him in the emergency room. The next day, he was removed to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, although he did not require hospitalization. What he required, was a place to stay, and Magee Rehabilitation Hospital couldn’t keep him because providing shelter wasn't its' function. Barry Giddings, with the help of Stefan Presser, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, took the city of Philadelphia to court. The class action suit charged that the city policy discriminates against homeless people who are disabled, and thereby violates their Constitutional right to equal protection under the law as well as their rights under Section 504 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973. That statute forbids discrimination against the handicapped in any program receiving Federal funds, and Philadelphia's Division of Adult Services, as part of the Department of Human Services, does receive Federal money. The city of Philadelphia quickly caved in, placed Giddings in a temporary shelter and said it would find permanent housing for him and his mother. As Stefan Presser points out, a particularly shocking thing about the case was that although the city had been engaged in a vigorous campaign to get the homeless into shelters, it had this firm policy of shutting out the disabled among the homeless. "There's no telling," Presser told me, “how many disabled people have been turned away until we got the policy changed, and who knows what happened to them? Some of the organizations for the disabled inform me that from time to time they've had phone calls from people who have been refused shelter because they're not able-bodied, but when they got to the phone booth from which the call was made, there was no one there." Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man could have a counterpart in the experiences of the nation's disabled for many, many years. As Robert Funk, Director of the Disability Rights, Education and Defense Fund, wrote in 1981: “American society, under the guise of humanitarian efforts, has developed a record, with respect to treatment of disabled persons, that is a history of isolation and discrimination inflicted upon them because of their ‘handicaps.’ This history, manifested in the attitude of ‘out of sight, out of mind,' carried out through policies of custodialism, has resulted in an ostracized, invisible minority denied access to organized society." This year, in his part of a forthcoming book, Images of the Disabled/Disabling Images, Funk makes the corollary point—— and see if any of this applies to you ---- that "the general public does not associate the word 'discrimination' with the segregation and exclusion of disabled people. Most people assume that disabled people are excluded from school or segregated because they cannot learn or because they need special protection. So too, the absence of disabled coworkers is simply considered a confirmation of the obvious fact that disabled people can't work. These assumptions are deeply rooted in history. Historically, the inferior economic and social status of disabled people has been viewed as the inevitable consequence of tho physical and mental differences imposed by disability." I know a young woman whose disability is athetosis, a form of cerebral palsy, which affects her speech and the way she walks. She is a first-class writer --- a published writer --- and a graduate of Harvard Law School. Currently in Hartford, she specializes in state regulation of automobile and homeowners’ insurance. Her name is Lisa Blumberg and she wrote me recently: "If nondisabled adults spent more time talking to disabled adults, they would learn that anatomy is not destiny and never has been." But because many disabled adults are segregated from the rest of the population, misconceptions about them, along with ignorance of who they actually are, continue to create more discrimination. For instance. Michael Landwehr of the Council for Disability Rights in Chicago, born with spina bifida, was disabled during surgery when he was 12. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. Landwehr watched with great interest when in 1973 Congress enacted Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act forbidding discrimination against the disabled in any programs or activities that receive Federal funding. So what has Michael Landwehr's life been like since 1973? “I have been denied an apartment based on my disability," he says. “Last year I was uprooted from home when the commuter train I took to work refused to let me continue riding without an attendant. I was told I could not buy a ticket in the first-class section of an airliner unless I also purchased a ticket for an attendant. I have been denied jobs and promotions on the basis of my disability. Every day I am denied access to public transportation. [He is in A wheelchair.] “Hundreds of thousands of disabled persons remain incarcerated in nursing homes and institutions, isolated from every aspect of community life, denied their right to vote, denied the right to education and employment. Disabled people remain the most unemployed and underpaid group in the country. For every dollar earned by a nondisabled white male, a disabled white male earns 52 cents, a disabled minority male earns 25 cents, and a disabled minority woman earns 12 cents." But the disability rights movement is gathering momentum and has already brought about some changes. Accordingly, by the end of this decade, there is likely to be a stretching of public consciousness concerning this form of American apartheid that has largely been ignored during the rise of all the other movements for equal protection under the law-—blacks, women, Native Americans, homosexuals and lesbians, Hispanics, et al. Future columns will include an exploration of the nonviolent direct-action arm of the disability rights movement, which is currently the most vigorous continuation of the Martin Luther King-Saul Alinsky legacy. The series will also go into the history of legislation and court action concerning the disabled; the seemingly infinite ways in which the disabled are distorted, sentimentalized, and underestimated by the press, television, and films; a battery of very specific legislative recommendations by the disabled; and a good deal more. One of the underlying themes is a comment by Vassar Miller, who has published eight volumes of poetry, one of which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In her early sixties now, she was born with cerebral palsy. “What handicaps me far more than my physical condition," she says, “is the reaction society has to it. And, no less important, my reaction to society's reaction." Vassar Miller has edited a new book, Despite This Flesh (University of Texas Press), an extraordinarily illuminating collection of short stories and poems about the disabled. If public television had any imagination, a striking series could be made from Despite This Flesh. It ranges from pungent, poignant, and sharply funny evocations of childhood to a resoundingly erotic poem about a paralyzed man, "Seated Nude" by Richard Ronan. In her introduction, Vassar Miller tells of how, when she was a child, before there was ever such a thing as special education or mainstreaming, her stepmother “had tried to enroll me in a private school. ‘They just looked at me and started talking about God!‘" her stepmother said in dismayed tones when she came home. By the time the 1980s are over, a picket line of the disabled might elbow God aside and change the admissions policies of a school like that. The pressure is rising inside the disabled to break out of their caste, to be visible, to be part of whatever the hell's going on that they want to be part of. Consider ADAPT (American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit). In a number of cities around the country, its members have been demonstrating and getting arrested in protests against the lack of lifts on buses and the absence of ways of enabling the disabled to use other forms of public transportation. On October 6 in Los Angeles, a march of some 280 disabled ended at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, where the American Public Transit Association was holding a convention. This was the scene, as described in The Disability Rag (Box 145, Louisville, Kentucky): "Attempts by ADAPT members to descend to the main lobby of the Bonaventure on the one elevator connecting the lobby with the street level were met with police resistance. Security forces turned off the elevator and escalators. Police blocked doors to prevent other disabled people from entering the hotel. Chants of ‘We Will Ride!‘ filled the Bonaventure from protesters inside and out. A number of ADAPT marchers, determined that conventioneers would not be able to use the escalators either, tried to block the escalator entrances or to throw themselves down the steps....By Monday, the Bonaventure had become a police-held fortress.“ I bet you never thought disabled people could do anything like that. It's just the beginning. As an ADAPT organizer yelled at a crowd of the disabled in Los Angeles, “We've got to get over our slave mentality!"
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Los Angeles Herald 10/7/85 Two photos on right side of page. Top PHOTO: Looking down from above at a busy street corner, with a curb cut. A bus stopped at the curb is completely surrounded by dozens of protesters in wheelchairs and some standing. Several have signs and they go from the front, along the outside of the bus and out behind off the edge of the picture. The second lane is empty of cars, and the third lane is stacked with cars. On the sidewalk beside a big building is another large group of the protesters, most with signs. A couple of people are moving between the two groups. Lower PHOTO: A man (Bill Bolte) in a motorized wheelchair wearing a tall cowboy hat and a sign around his neck, glasses and a salt and pepper beard, is flanked by a police officer on each side. They lean forward, one is driving the chair, the other resting his hand on the armrest. Behind them a mass of people is just visible. Photo caption: Wheelchair-riding demonstrators demanding special lifts on public buses fill the streets around the Bonaventure Hotel, above, while one of them. Bill Bolte, below, is arrested. [Headline] Wheelchair-bound demonstrators tie up mass transit meeting By Philipp Gollner Herald staff writer 10/7/85 Eight wheelchair-bound protesters were arrested yesterday while close to 200 others jammed the lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel downtown to demand greater access for the disabled to public transportation. The demonstrators, members of about 15 disabled-rights advocacy groups from around the country, are demanding a federal law that would order all public transit operators to install automatic wheelchair lifts in buses. Such a law existed as part of the Federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, but was successfully challenged in court six years ago by the American Public Transit Association, a trade group representing more than 400 transit districts nationwide. The association began its four-day annual convention yesterday at the Bonaventure, and protesters picked the occasion to voice their demands. “We're going to show the American (Public) Transit Association that we don't take crap and we're going to let them know that we are not passive crips," protester Bill Bolte, who has been on crutches or confined to a wheelchair for 52 of his 54 years, told demonstrators at the start of yesterday's protest. The demonstrators rode their wheelchairs down Wilshire Boulevard from MacArthur Park to the Bonaventure, where they hoped to talk to association executive vice president Jack R. Gilstrap and visit convention exhibits. But police blocked elevators and escalators leading to the convention floor, and after about 40 minutes, officers began handcuffing protesters who refused to disperse from fire exits of the second-story lobby where they had assembled. As police carried a wheelchair-bound demonstrator from the lobby, a sympathizer shouted: “Why don't you handcuff his legs? He might run away.” Six wheelchair-bound protesters blocked the path of a departing Airport Express bus that they said was not equipped with a lift. The bus was able to leave after police lifted the protesters and their wheelchairs onto the sidewalk. Inside the hotel, startled guests looked on as protesters chanted “we will ride" and “Gilstrap, Gilstap, where are you?" Seven of the eight protesters who were arrested were driven by specially-equipped vans to the county‘s Central Jail, where they were booked for failure to disperse and interfering with police. One female protester was taken to Sybil Brand institute for Women. All eight were being held last night on $500 bail each. “We certainly aren't unsympathetic to the people involved, but we are responsible for enforcing the law,” Deputy Police Chief Clyde Cronkhite, commander of operations at Central Bureau, told reporters following the arrests. in addition to demanding wheelchair lifts in all public buses, demonstrators at yesterday's protest demanded that the association fire its president, Gilstrap, and pass a resolution pledging commitment to restoring wheelchair access legislation. Albert Engelken. the association's deputy executive director, told reporters yesterday that "Mr. Gilstrap has no intention of resigning" and that there are no plans to vote on any resolutions proposed by the protest groups. Engelken said the group opposes federal wheelchair access laws mainly for what he called "geographical and climatic reasons." The lifts are cumbersome in snow and on curved roads. he said. In addition, it would cost transit districts nearly $270 per disabled passenger boarding if such legislation were implemented, he said. Usha Viswanathan, spokeswoman for the Southern California Rapid Transit District, said the district spends between $15,000 and $20,000 for each automatic lift that it buys. Viswanathan said 1,891 of 2,445 active RTD buses are equipped with lifts. Engelken said the association prefers decisions over access legislation to be made at the local level. But demonstrators at yesterday's protest believe that federal legislation is needed to guarantee the civil rights of the disabled. They argue that current policies violate their constitutional right to equal protection of the laws. "The small things in life that non-disabled people take for granted we have to work harder for," Christina Keeffer. who suffers from cerebral palsy, said. "l'm 42 now and I don’t want to wait until I'm 75 to get the changes."
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The San Diego Union March 2, 1986, page A3 The West [section of newspaper] Drawing of Mr Louv's head: White, youngish, short dark hair parted on side and glasses. [Headline] Transportation news for handicapped ‘a nightmare’ By Richard Louv The WHEELCHAIRS are rolling. On Jan. 16, in Dallas, handicapped demonstrators decrying "taxation without transportation," chained themselves to public buses, forcing traffic detours for nearly six hours. In downtown Los Angeles, last Oct 7, more than 200 people in wheelchairs rolled down the middle of Wilshire Boulevard to protest the policies of the American Public Transit Association. In San Antonio last April, 60 handicapped people staged a four-hour protest at the city's public transit offices, causing 90 nervous bus company employees to lock themselves in their offices for an hour until the transit association agreed to meet the demonstrators. And on Feb. 13, Houston police arrested eight demonstrators in wheelchairs and carted them off to jail in lift-equipped police vans. Their sentencing is tomorrow. and a representative of the Denver-based American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit told me that if the protesters “spend weeks in jail, it will be like when Martin Luther King went to jail in Birmingham. People will realize we're not just out playing in the street" What's going on here? The disabled~rights movement isn't new, of course. It began in Berkeley in the late 60s, and ultimately resulted in a government shift from segregating handicapped people to "mainstreaming" them into the rest of society. According to Cyndi Jones, publisher of San Diego-based Mainstream, a national magazine for the “able-disabled," some of the first generation leaders "got co-opted by government jobs, and frustration for the rest of us has been growing." A raft of laws were passed during the 1970s, but the laws. says Jones. still haven't been fully implemented. “The Rehabilitation Act promised disabled people equal access to public transportation facilities and education and employment. In education. the news has been good, but transportation is a nightmare." IN 1981, CONTENDING THAT putting lifts on buses was an unrealistic expense, the American Public Transit Association sued the federal government and won. Most cities stopped deploying the mechanical lifts that enable people using wheelchairs, walkers and crutches to board buses. The favored transportation method, at least among municipal officials, became small, subsidized "dial-a-ride" vans. "That's like putting us back in segregated schools," says Jones. The disability groups have a number of other complaints, some of them affecting many more people — lack of housing, attended care, airplane facilities. But what it has come down to is the symbol of lifts. While some disabled people are satisfied with the dial-a-ride approach, Jones says "taking a van service can cost you $60 to get to work and back. You have to call and reserve a ride — sometimes days in advance, and these services can't always guarantee a specific arrival time or even take you home. As a result, a lot of us can't afford to work, or we just stay home." California still requires lifts on all new buses, but Jones contends that the transit companies can develop some creative delaying tactics. Roger Snoble, the San Diego Transit Corp.'s general manager, agrees with her. "Some cities," he says, "don't care whether the lifts work once they put them on. They just let them go, and then say the lifts don't work." Jones, by the way, gives relatively high marks to San Diego's bus system; not so to the trolley. which she calls “miserable for handicapped people." As she sees it, a new generation of leaders in the disabled~rights movement is just now coming of age. They have some powerful opponents —— with some powerful statistics. Jim Mills, chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Development Board, has pointed out that in Los Angeles the average cost per ride of the various dial-a-ride systems “is $6.22, while the costs associated with a one-way trip on a bus for a person in a wheelchair is $300." And in a recent interview, Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm told me, "I think it is a myopic use of capital to try to put a lift on every bus in America. It costs the St. Louis bus system $700 per ride to maintain lifts." But Roger Snoble says it costs San Diego far less — $166 per ride (as of a year ago, "the last time we checked, and we expect the cost to continue to decline because of dramatically improving technology." And when I mentioned Lamm's figures to Dennis Cannon, the chief federal watchdog for the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Transit Compliance Board, he said, “Lamm's figures are at least six or seven years old, and wrong. These same figures get used a lot by lift opponents, but they're based on one of the very first generations of lifts, which were poorly administered and poorly installed by St. Louis during one the worst winters in Missouri history." He points out that Seattle, with one of the best bus systems in the nation, has managed to get the per-ride costs down to $5 or $10, depending on the amount of ridership. And Denver has decreased its lift failures from 25 a day to five within the last year. WITH ADVANCES LIKE this, combined with the increasing demands from disabled groups, a number of cities have decided that the lifts make economic sense — maybe not in this decade, but soon. "What's about to hit is a wave of people who expect to have equal access, the children of the mainstreaming movement," says Jones. During the past decade, government and society encouraged disabled people to work independently, and now that generation will be at bus stops and trolley stations all over the country, waiting to go to work. With them will be aging baby boomers, a giant crop of potentially disabled seniors. "Only one~third of the disabled population is employed. but two-thirds of disabled people are not receiving any kind of benefits," says Andrea Farbman, a spokeswoman for the National Council on the Handicapped. “Still. we're spending huge amounts of money keeping people unemployed — $60 billion dollars a year, but only $2 billion going to rehabilitation and special education." One rough estimate, says Farbman, is that 200,000 handicapped people would enter the work force if the travel barriers were eliminated. adding as much as $1 billion in annual earnings to the economy. The tragedy is this: While politicians wrangle over the costs of bus lifts, nobody has studied how much money could be saved in government benefits, and how much could be gained through taxes and added national productivity if more handicapped Americans were employed.
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Photo by Tom Olin Los Angeles, 1985: Hands handcuffed with a wheelchair wheel in the background. "People who advocate freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." Frederick Douglass, 1817 - 1896 "We will not let any barrier keep us from the equality that is rightfully ours." Mike Auberger Co-founder, ADAPT ADAPT no steps logo 1478 Stayton Rd. Cumberland Furnace, TN 37051
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This story continues from the articles in ADAPT 217 and ADAPT 211. The text is included in ADAPT 217 for easier reading. Three photos. Photo 1: At the bottom of an escalator a mass of people in wheelchairs gathered together, Julie Farrar in the center, holding a picket sign: “APTA DESTROYED 504”. Photo 2: A man, Chris Hronis, lying on his side on the floor, handcuffed behind his back, surrounded by four or more police standing over him. Photo 3: Through the window of a van you see two man, Chris Hronis in back and Bob Kafka in front of him, sitting in wheelchairs. Both are handcuffed behind their backs.
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This article starts on ADAPT 217 and continues on ADAPT 210 where it ends before the end of the story. The text is included in 217 in its entirety for easier reading. Photo: A man, Bob Kafka, sitting awkwardly, almost falling out of his manual wheelchair, apparently handcuffed behind his back. His legs are falling under the chair, and he is surrounded by four or more police officers.
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This story is a continuation of the article in ADAPT 213, and the text is included there in its entirety for easier reading.
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[Headline] 6 held in protest by disabled [Subheading] Stage sit-in in Anderson’s L.B. Office By Bob Houser, staff writer Long Beach Press Telegram, 10/8/85, p. B/1 [This story continues on ADAPT 212 but the text is included here for easier reading.] Photo on top of the article by Leo Hetzel/Press-Telegram: Seen from above, George Cooper lies on the floor legs stretched out, back against some furniture. His empty manual wheelchair sits across the small crowded space. A police officer rests one hand on the wheelchair and looks down at George on the floor. In the foreground is someone's arm and hand on his/her crutch. Caption: Disabled protester, who was helped from his wheelchair by fellow demonstrators, lies on the floor of Rep. Glenn Anderson's office Monday as a Long Beach police officer urges him to leave. Six of 26 sit-ins seeking public transit access for disabled people were arrested for trespassing Monday in the office of Rep. Glenn Anderson, D-Long Beach. The protesters, many disabled and in wheelchairs, were removed from Anderson's sixth-floor office office in the Post Office building at Third Street and Long Beach Boulevard when they told Long Beach police officers they were going to stay until they could talk to Anderson. Boyd Kifer, Anderson’s district representative, explained that Anderson was on the House floor in Washington, D.C., and unable to talk to them. They said they would wait. Responding to a citizen's arrest request by the post office’s station manager, Lyle Van Dorne, police issued misdemeanor citations to six persons on the sidewalk in front of the post office. Ten of the group avoided citations by leaving the office. Names of the other 10 were recorded in field interviews that involved no arrests. Police Sgt. Dave Buchanan said the demonstrators were out-of-state people representing a national organization, American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT). Buchanan told the sit-ins that they would be given the citations rather than being booked at the station if they confined their demonstration to the public sidewalk. He also pointed out that a couple of the sit-ins, who had early evening flight reservations, would miss them if they insisted on going through the longer booking process. Jim Parker, of El Paso, Tex., spokesman for ADAPT, said his group comes to national conventions of the American Public Transit Association, now in session in Los Angeles, every year "to continue to press our demand for a policy of full, 100 percent accessibility to public transit for disabled people.” Parker said Anderson was targeted for the demonstration because he is chairman of the House Transportation Committee. Parker agreed with a statement from Anderson’s office that the congressman has voted in line with their wishes. He deplored Congress’ failure to overturn a Reagan administration order that killed a federal mandate for nationwide transit accessibility for the handicapped. About a dozen Long Beach police officers assisted in removing the protesters. The police group included a woman officer, K.M. Daeley, who communicated with some of the disabled in sign language. In a statement Monday evening, Anderson noted also that "it was this administration, not Congress, which overturned a requirement that the handicapped be given full accessibility to public transit.” That move, by administrative order, nullified the full access provision of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, Parker said, leaving that issue to the option of each state. Ironically, California opted, by state law, for full accessibility in new purchases of public transit vehicles, a fact that Parker saluted. In fact, Parker said Los Angeles is one of the better cities in the nation for lift-equipped buses. Nevertheless, the ADAPT group registered its protest in Long Beach and in a second day of demonstrations in downtown Los Angeles. Eight were arrested in Los Angeles Sunday for failure to disperse and interfering with police during a demonstration by about 130 activists. Anderson appealed to ADAPT to help block the Reagan administration’s intended cuts in public transit operating funds. "I would be pleased,” he said, "to try and make sure that administration officials sit down and discuss this important issue with the elderly and handicapped community.” Sgt. Buchanan said the Long Beach demonstrators, left the post office at about 1:30 p.m. Monday, but returned several hours later. "Three of them blocked traffic on Long Beach Boulevard with their wheelchairs,” he said, "but we just rolled them back to the sidewalk and they dispersed again.”
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PHOTO by Tom Olin: Ken Heard in shorts and an ADAPT no steps T-Shirt lies back in his wheelchair one leg extended to his joy stick on his footrest, the other spasming back toward his body. His face is grimaced in determination, his arm pulled up to his chest. His wheelchair is on the lift of a bus. He is surrounded by able bodied people (mostly police officers) trying to handle him and his wheelchair. The bus lift is down, and behind and above him, in shadow up inside the bus, you can see Edith Harris, her hand on the drive of her scooter.
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This article is a continuation of the story in ADAPT 224 and is contained in its entirety there for easier reading. 3 photos filling the top three-quarters of the page. Photo 1: A man (George Florum) in a manual wheelchair wearing a black no-steps ADAPT T-shirt is loaded onto a lift of some type of vehicle by three beefy police officers Caption: GEORGE FLOROM OF of Colorado Springs is arrested for blocking buses in Long Beach. Photo 2: A dark shot of a man in a white T-shirt (Chris Hronis) being pulled upward by several sets of hands. Caption: CHRIS HONIS [sic], a California ADAPT member, is arrested at the Bonaventure Hotel. Photo 3: a couple of small groups of protesters in wheelchairs and standing, are in front of one bus and beside another, while police stand nearby. Caption: ACTIVISTS hold a bus captive in Long Beach. To the left of photo 3 is an ADAPT "we will ride" logo with the wheelchair access guy and an equal sign in the big wheel.
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[Headline] Protest by disabled clogs downtown L.B. PRESS-TELEGRAM (AM/PM)/THURSDAY, Oct. 10, 1985, p. A10 FROM/A1 batch of arrests in the 200 block of Pine. At that point, protest leader Rev. Wade Blank, of Denver, told police there would be no further disruptions. Blank thanked the police for the way the department had handled the demonstration and said the remaining protesters were tired and hungry. During the afternoon, police Lt. Norm Benson conferred at length with protest leaders, pointing out that, despite whatever police sympathies there might be for the cause, the event took patrolmen off their rounds and posed an impediment to emergency vehicles. Benson even made a call to the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where the American Public Transit Association is holding a convention, in an attempt to reach Laurence Jackson, general manager and president of Long Beach Transit and new president of the APTA, to urge him to speak by phone with an ADAPT spokesperson. Guy Heston, the bus company’s director of marketing, interviewed at the scene of the bus tie-ups, said the request to talk with Jackson was untenable because "they came unannounced, and, as you know, he has commitments at the convention." An ADAPT spokesman, Jim Parker of El Paso, told a reporter as he was being steered toward a Dial-a-Lift van for the trip to the Long Beach jail, "This is probably going to be the largest mass arrest of disabled people in the history of this country." He stressed that the targets of Wednesday's demonstration and one Monday in the office of Rep. Glenn Anderson, D-Long Beach, were the APTA, which closes its four-day convention today in Los Angeles, and Anderson, as chairman of the House subcommittee on surface transportation. "One very important thing for the people of Long Beach, Los Angeles County and California to understand," Parker said, "is that this is not aimed at them, because California and cities like Long Beach and Los Angeles are really models for the country to look at. "Most of the buses have lifts on them, and all new buses purchased will have lifts. "I guess, for the first time, disabled people have come to the city where the president of APTA resides . . . to help pull the federal government back into the issue again, along with APTA." ADAPT asserts that it was a legal action by APTA, followed by an administrative order in early months of the first Reagan administration, that killed a law mandating phased in accessibility for the disabled to public transit across the country. The order left the decision up to local option. Jackson could not be reached for comment Wednesday, but Long Beach Transit Assistant General Manager Patrick Butters said that nine of 18 fixed routes in Long Beach are wheelchair accessible, while 85 percent of all the company's public buses in the city are equipped with wheelchair lifts. "On an ongoing basis we’ve been increasing that" percentage, said Butters. A committee on the handicapped advises Long Beach Transit on which bus routes to offer lift service on, said Butters. "We’ve tried to hit the routes that are most heavily traveled," he said. An average of 12 to 14 persons a day who are confined to wheelchairs ride on fixed Long Beach Transit routes, said Butters. In addition to regular bus service, Dial-a-Lift service is available in Long Beach, Lakewood and Signal Hill, he added. At the height of the protest, Frank Lozano and Martin Walton took a stand in front of an RTD bus that had eight Long Beach Transit buses backed up behind it at Pine and Broadway. The passengers of those idled buses, workers and schoolchildren heading for home, were not happy with the delay. "Hey, I just want to go home; take a shower, eat some supper and watch the ball game," said one man. But Lozano, who is blind, and Walton, confined to a wheelchair, held their ground. "No, it doesn't surprise me,” Lozano said of the anger from the riders. "I realize that there are many people who are unaware of the issues." California is one of two states – Michigan is the other — that mandate that all new public transit buses be equipped with wheelchair lifts. The demonstrators said they were aware of this but believe that Jackson and APTA can pressure the other 48 states into enacting similar legislation. Press-Telegram staff writer Don Currie contributed to this article. Photo located on top middle of the page. Woman in an electric wheelchair wearing ADAPT stickers raises her hand in a power fist and yells. Meanwhile two informed officers load her onto a lift equipped paratransit van. The driver of the van stands in the doorway waiting. A person in a wheelchair watches from the side. Photo credit: Michael Rondou/Press-Telegram Caption: Protester is lifted onto a Dial-a-Lift van, which has the access she wants on buses, after her arrest on Long Beach Boulevard.
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Mainstream magazine, no date listed, p.9. Attachment IV [Story continues in ADAPT 211 and then ADAPT 210 but is included here in its entirety for easier reading. Story seems to be cut off at the end.] Photo bottom half of page: Image of people marching down the center of the street, some carrying signs, one with the ADAPT logo and another saying, “APTA OPPRESSES." Line snakes back out of sight alongside traffic in the back. Wheelchairs are lined up smartly presenting an impressive image. [Headline] ADAPT PUBLIC TRANSIT OR ELSE by Mike Ervin One of the largest civil rights marches in history by people with disabilities was held Sunday, October 7, 1985 in downtown Los Angeles to protest the American Public Transit Association (APTA)'s policy of local option transit for disabled. In response to an “invitation” by American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) to join in picketing the annual APTA convention, national leaders of the Disability Rights Movement converged at MacArthur Park to roll the 1.7 miles to the convention site at the Bonaventure Hotel. Bill Bolte of the California Association of the Physically Handicapped (CAPH) took a head count of the line of people in wheelchairs rolling single file down the middle of Wilshire Boulevard and announced that there was 215 present. The L.A. Police Department had refused to issue a parade permit to the group and had said it would not allow the long planned parade to be held on the street, but when 200 plus wheelchair users took to the pavement (no curb cuts) all the police could do was route traffic around the procession. It was an impressive sight; more than twice the number of people ADAPT had turned out for previous demonstrations at the annual conventions of APTA. As the line of people stretched more than a block in front of the posh Bonaventure Hotel where APTA was staying, the L.A. Police waited; there wasn’t much they could do except establish their presence. The protesters marched into the hotel lobby taking up most of the available space. Chants of “We will ride!" Filled the atrium below as bewildered hotel guests wondered what all this could possibly be about. The Hotel Security immediately blocked the one wheelchair accessible elevator to the main lobby. This escalated (so to speak) the confrontation, as demonstrators got out of their wheelchairs to block the escalators, saying “if you block our access, then we will block the escalators. No one will be able to use them." Meanwhile the police discussed the strategy of arresting certain people first whom they had identified as leaders. Photo: A man, Bob Kafka, sitting awkwardly, almost falling out of his manual wheelchair, apparently handcuffed behind his back. His legs are falling under the chair, and he is surrounded by four or more police officers. Article continues: Eight people, one woman and seven men, were arrested and booked without charges. The police told the media that the charge was “refusing to leave the scene of a riot.” The woman arrestee was released Sunday night, five of the men were released the following afternoon, and the last two men were released Tuesday morning after 53 disabled individuals held an all night vigil outside the county jail. On Tuesday morning, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), represented by Lou Nau, the chairman of the Disability Rights Committee of the ACLU, outlined the treatment that the arrestees faced. Four of the men were handcuffed behind their backs and left to sit in the police vehicles for up to five hours. Mike Auburger, a quadriplegic, was not allowed to use the bathroom for eight hours, causing hyperreflexia. Individuals on sustaining medication repeatedly asked for their medication, but never received it. Nau said to permit no bail for misdemeanor offenses is clearly against the law. Although APTA tried to discredit the protestors as a “small militant group of outsiders," they represented a wide spectrum of the Disability Rights Movement including Robert Funk, Executive Director of the Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund; Michael Winter, Director of the Center for Independent Living, Berkeley, CA; Judy Heumann, of the World Institute on Disability; Joe Zenzola, President, California Association of the Physically Handicapped; Peg Nosek, of Independent Living Research Utilization Project, Houston, TX; Catherine Johns, President of The Association on Handicapped Student Service Programs in Post-Secondary Education; John Chapples, Department of Rehabilitation, Boston, MA; Mark Johnson, Department of Rehabilitation, Denver, CO; Marco Bristo, Director, Access Living, Chicago, IL; Harlan Hahn, Professor, University of Southern California; and Don Galloway, D.C. Center for Independent Living. The following days saw many more protests in the Los Angeles area. On Wednesday, about 50 individuals arrived at the office of Larry Jackson, Director of the Long Beach Transit Authority, who is the incoming President of APTA. After being denied a meeting with him, they went out into the streets. The police gave them l0 minutes to disburse or be arrested. When no one moved, the police proceeded to arrest the protestors and take them to jail in 6 dial-a-ride vans. These individuals were booked and then released, as it was not possible for the Long Beach Police Department to accommodate so many disabled people. The passers-by had many different reactions to what they were experiencing; some were mad at being detained, some joined in. One man gave protestors a banner which read “help” and proceeded to distribute little American.... [rest of the article is not available.] Three photos. Photo 1: At the bottom of an escalator a mass of people in wheelchairs gathered together, Julie Farrar in the center, holding a picket sign: “APTA DESTROYED 504”. Photo 2: A man, Chris Hronis, lying on his side on the floor, handcuffed behind his back, surrounded by four or more police standing over him. Photo 3: Through the window of a van you see two man, Chris Hronis in back and Bob Kafka in front of him, sitting in wheelchairs. Both are handcuffed behind their backs.
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A photo (by Tom Olin?): A group of demonstrators, some using wheelchairs, seem to be waiting by the side of the road. Three posters are readable: "ACCESSIBLE TRANSPORTATION NOW!" and "APTA OPPRESSES." Diane Coleman sits on the left side of the picture holding a CAPH (California Association of the Physically Handicapped) sign, beside her a woman stands, hands on her hips, behind her an attendant is standing. Beside her Tom Pugh sits in a manual wheelchair, and on his other side Frank McColm is also in a manual chair looking over his shoulder to his right. Standing behind and beside Frank, slightly behind the APTA Oppresses sign Wade Blank stands with his arms crossed in front of his ADAPT T-shirt. Beside him is another person standing. On the far right in the very front Beverly Furnice reclines in her chair looking off to her left with an unreadable sign in her lap.
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Denver Post, Issues, 10/6/85, no page number [Headline] Transit leaders to face protests from disabled By Jack Farrar Special to the Denver Post The American Public Transit Association will run into some political street theater when it rolls into Los Angeles today for its annual meeting. Waiting for the group will be a militant cast of handicapped individuals, including members of a Denver organization called Atlantis, who want full accessibility to the nation's public transportation system. As APTA delegates convene at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, more than 100 people in wheelchairs – members of the American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit – will be “marching” single-file from MacArthur Park, more than a mile away, to begin a week-long series of demonstrations. They won't have a parade permit. They haven't asked for one. Through such acts of civil disobedience, the demonstrators hope to force the APTA, public officials and the news media to think about what they consider to be the most pressing issue facing the handicapped: access to public transportation. One contingent of protesters will be led by Wade Blank, a 44-year-old Denverite who cut his activist teeth in the 1960s, marching with blacks in Alabama and peaceniks in Ohio. Access 'a right'[boldface] Blank is the founder and executive director of Atlantis, one of ADAPT's most militant member organizations. “Jobs and education don't mean much,” Blank argues, “if you can't take a bus to get there. Accessibility to public transportation – moving from one place to the other – should be a right, not just a consumer service.” For the past three years, ADAPT, largely under Blank's leadership, has demanded that APTA adopt total accessibility for the handicapped as an official policy rather than as an objective. Transit association officials have responded by citing numerous improvements made in service for the handicapped – improvements that the handicapped have applauded – and contends that total accessibility is financially impractical. “We have not ignored the handicapped,” says APTA Deputy Executive Director Albert Engelken. “Accessibility is a compelling issue. But total accessibility is an enormous undertaking, and with federal dollars shrinking, our resources are limited. In any case, it is not the role of an association like ours to establish policy.” Disabled activists, however, believe the costs of accessibility are distorted by the transportation industry. Moreover, they argue, the issue is civil rights, not economics. “Public transportation is a tax-supported system,” Blank says. “The handicapped pay taxes. It's as simple as that. How would the average taxpayer feel if he was denied access to a facility he paid for?” Long regarded as a quiet minority, disabled individual recently have added a more confrontational approach to their struggle for equality, and the man frequently in the front lines of that movement is Blank, whose long blond hair and granny glasses evoke the image of the 1960s activist. He encourages the handicapped to take to the streets when they feel their demands are being taken less than seriously. Members of Atlantis have made headlines locally and nationally with their tactics in Denver – chaining themselves to seats of fast food restaurants, occupying intersections that don't accommodate wheelchairs, and blocking the entrances to buildings with architectural barriers. Rules watered down [boldface] Progress in making public transportation available to the handicapped can be traced to the Urban Mass Transit Administration's adoption of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act in 1979. [sic] Section 504 generally made it illegal to exclude any individual, by reason of handicap, from any program receiving federal dollars. UMTA's regulations stated that all new buses purchased with federal money must include wheelchair lifts and aimed for 50 percent of peak-hour accessibility on regular bus routes. RTD standards strict [boldface] The Regional Transportation District in metropolitan Denver has adopted accessibility standards that are more stringent than required. Even after Section 504 regulations were softened in 1981, RTD's board chose to maintain its commitment to provide 50 percent peak-hour accessibility on all routes, and 100 percent off-peak accessibility. And RTD will soon become the first public transit system in the United States to introduce wheelchair lifts on its larger, regional commuter buses. Despite such advances, Blank will not be satisfied until disabled individuals throughout the United States can board and ride a bus whenever and wherever the able-bodied do the same. “We simply want APTA, as the association which speaks for the public transportation industry, to declare its intention to make the system accessible. We know it will take time. But isn't this the country that put a man on the moon?”