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ಮುಖಪುಟ / ಸಂಪುಟಗಳು / ಟ್ಯಾಗ್ ಗಳು Detroit
+ ADAPT - American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation + Disability Rights 2
ADAPT (271)
January / February 1987 METRO Magazine [Headline] Handicapped Rights and APTA Highlighted text: A seeming fixture at APTA conventions is a demonstration by the handicapped. In this exclusive interview with METRO Magazine,Rev. Wade Blank describes the movement’s goals and objectives. Shortly before the APTA Annual Meeting in Detroit last October, the General Assembly of the Denver Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church unanimously passed a resolution favoring 100% accessibility to all publicly funded transit buses. The resolution calls upon the" U.S. DOT “to mandate that all public buses bought with federal monies be accessible to all people, specifically including those persons who use wheelchairs for mobility." The resolution declares that equal access to public transportation is a basic human right. It urges the American Public Transit Association to support total accessibility, and calls on all public transit systems to work toward the goal as well. According to sponsors of the resolution, 14% of U.S. citizens are disabled and thus denied full access. The resolution also recommends to all churches and church agencies to consider adding equal access facilities to all their church buses and vans. Wade Blank, a Presbyterian minister and leader in the disability rights movement for 11 years, said the resolution is the latest effort in the struggle to enable disabled Americans to integrate into their communities. According to Blank, disability rights is a civil rights movement similar to the black political movement of the 1950's and 60's. Blank is a leader of ADAPT, the Denver-based American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, an organization which has demonstrated on behalf of disability rights at several APTA conventions in recent years. Blank said his organization has about 800 people who actively support it, though he believes many thousands more wheelchair-bound people would do so if they could. What follows is an interview with Rev. Blank conducted in Detroit during the APTA Annual Meeting there during which 18 disabled individuals were arrested for demonstrating at the city hall. METRO: Mr. Blank, what is your organization trying to accomplish at this APTA meeting? Blank: First of all, in 1983 we introduced a resolution before APTA in Denver, Colorado, in which we said that we wanted APTA to vote in favor of having public transportation accessible to people in wheelchairs. That resolution said three things. First, that APTA should inform all its members that it will now endorse accessibility; second, that they should take a public vote member by member (about the issue); and third, that they should inform the transportation industry that accessibility is their position. They have refused since 1983 to act on the resolution, so we assume that that means they don't favor accessible public transit. Now as to what we are doing here. Whenever APTA goes into a community (to hold a convention) we do two things: we demonstrate against APTA, and we use the occasion to illustrate to the public that their local transit system is not wheelchair accessible, in other words, every bus being wheelchair accessible. METRO: Over the years your organization has demonstrated at a number of APTA meetings and very often the demonstrations have been very disruptive. Do you think that your activities have paid off? Blank: They've paid off in the sense that first they are directed to other people with disabilities in order to raise their consciousness about their rights. Our group has grown three times over the last few years. Secondly, it tells the able-bodied public that people in wheelchairs cannot board transit, which most people never even think about. And thirdly, it teaches the community at large that our political movement is in fact a civil rights movement. METRO: Your organization demonstrates against APTA. But isn't it true that you're also hoping for action on the local level wherever you mount a demonstration? Blank: Yes. In effect, APTA does our organizing for us by picking the cities it goes into. We follow and go in and raise consciousness for our cause. I don’t think anyone can understand how alienating it is (to be disabled). My daughter is in a wheelchair. If she goes to a bus stop and the doors open and shut and the bus drives off without her, there's no way of expressing to people how alienated, how shut out that makes her feel. Of course, the transit people want to make it an economic argument...but that didn't cut it with the black movement and it's not going to cut it with the disabled movement either. METRO: How is ADAPT funded? And what is your annual budget? Blank: Mainly from the Roman Catholic Campaign for Human Development, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans and the United Church of Christ. ADAPT itself doesn't have a budget per se. A trip like this (to Detroit) will run us approximately $15,000 for all the logistics involved, hotels, food, attendant care, just the logistics of moving that large number of disabled. METRO: How big is your staff? Blank: We don't have a staff, we don't have bylaws, we don't even have officers. It's just a consensus group. For example, in Denver, the disabled groups each do their own thing, and there's a lot of individuals who have joined ADAPT by simply saying, I want to be part of it. That's all it takes. We have a list of names of who those people are. METRO: You mentioned the logistics of moving the disabled. Do you bring people along with you to do the demonstrating, or do you seek to have local disabled join in? How does this work? Blank: In July we flew here with some disabled and met with the local disabled. They basically said they'd recently filed suit and were trying to get access to the buses, but that they didn't believe they could support any demonstrations because they'd be afraid to lose what they have now. That's almost to the letter the situation in every community we go into. The disabled are very afraid to lose what little they have. Plus, a disabled person in a wheelchair is by definition passive about the way they see themselves. But before we leave Detroit we will have a few people who will dare. By seeing the press, they'll see it's pretty amazing and they want to be a part of this. It changes the way they view themselves. That's how we recruit members. METRO: Tell me how the organization started? Blank: It started in Denver in 1975 when we announced we were going to make the transit system there accessible. Everybody laughed at us. We had about 20 members. We filed suit and lost. On July 5, 1978, the day after the suit was lost, we went down and blocked the first two buses in the whole movement. We held those buses for two days, sleeping on the streets. The battle in Denver went on in spurts. We started in 1978. In 1979 (Denver RTD) announced they'd make their transit buses accessible, but in 1980 when Reagan took office they went to a posture of inaccessibility. We hit the streets again and they reverted back to accessibility. In 1982, they finally signed an agreement with us that they would be totally accessible. So then other groups asked us: how did you do that? we'd like you to teach us how. Rather than just sit in Denver and enjoy our system, we decided to export what we'd won there using the same tactics on a national basis. METRO: You said earlier that the economic argument against accessibility doesn't fly. Yet to APTA and the transit industry the economic argument is very real. After all, the funds to pay for accessibility come out of their budgets. They can cite some very dramatic statistics of how much subsidy each handicapped ride costs. So how can you say the economic argument doesn't carry weight? Blank: Because those figures are not true. Denver, for example, bought 160 buses. The lowest bidders (for that contract) bid accessible buses. Neoplan undercut everybody else’s bid and they bid accessible. So you can't go just by the lifts themselves, you go by the total cost of the bus. METRO: But you also have to consider the maintenance costs and personnel costs too. In San Francisco. for example, one of the agencies there has two maintenance workers who do nothing but service the lifts, that's all those individuals do. Blank: That's true. But they have people who work on the motors, and people who work on the brakes, and people who work on every aspect of the buses that service the able bodied. The figures out of Seattle and Denver on maintenance per lift is under $400 a year, if they do preventive maintenance. Now that's a lot lower than APTA's figures of $2,500 per lift (per year). That figure is correct if you don't ever fix the lifts. In other words if you drive around and they break down and they're all gummed up, then you have to put new hydraulics in because you haven’t changed the oil. Then you're going to top out at $2,500 the same way if you don't keep your car up. METRO: During his remarks to APTA, CBS correspondent Ed Bradley charged your organization had mounted a mailgram campaign against his coming. He went on to give a presentation about apartheid in South Africa Your comments? Blank: The disabled community in the United States is suffering from a form of apartheid. The disabled live in section 8 housing, high-rise housing which is for disabled and elderly, They live in nursing homes. They go to workshops like Goodwill where they're segregated, and they are paid under 10 cents an hour in the average workshop in the United States. That's what the salary is. The disabled can't ride public transportation, so you have a form of apartheid. METRO: Thank you.
ADAPT (287)
Monday Oct. 6, I986 / THE DETROIT NEWS / p.3B City/suburbs/state Title: Transit group averts clash with handicapped Disabled protest at Greenfield Village PHOTO News Photo by Gary Portes: A very large crowd of people in business attire walk away from a building. Most have name tags. Capition reads: APTA members take a hike after being blocked out of Greenfield Village by ADAPT. By Richard Chin, NEWS Staff Writer Using a back entrance to Greenfield Village, a convoy of SEMTA buses filled with delegates to a national transportation convention avoided a confrontation Sunday with about 100 members of a militant disabled-rights group. The buses, under police escort, slipped into Greenfield Village along a service road from a nearby Ford Motor Co. facility. The protesters were waiting in front of the main entrance to Greenfield Village. THE BUSES were en route to a dinner reception for members of the American Public Transit Association (APTA), which met in Detroit over the weekend. The protesters are members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, which has been trying to disrupt APTA meetings for three years. They demand improved access for the disabled to buses and other public transportation. Sunday‘s protest began with a wheelchair march from Rosa Park Boulevard down Michigan Avenue to the Westin Hotel in the Renaissance Center, where the APTA delegates are staying. The group had planned a wheelchair parade on the street but Detroit City Council rescinded the group's parade permit Sept. 29, fearing the protest would disrupt city transportation. AS THE GROUP wheeled along the sidewalk, up to 15 city police cars worked to keep them from spilling onto the street. Once they arrived at the hotel, the protesters were quickly herded into a barricaded area that kept them from entering the hotel. Group leaders said once they realized they couldn't enter the building or keep the buses carrying the delegates from leaving, they left themselves for Greenfield Village to try to block entrances. However, the SEMTA buses slipped through the back entrance. THE GROUP did manage to turn away several cars carrying late arrivers at the dinner, and after Greenfield Village was closed to the public at 6 p.rn., restricted all but guests at a private wedding from entering. APTA raised the ire of the protesters through what the protesters said were policies discriminatory against the disabled. They said APTA opposes making all buses wheelchair accessible. “l think they're afraid some of the riders don't want tn ride with diaabled people because some diaabled people are not attractive," aaid Jack Warren, 43. of Cincinnati. He said the stance reflects that of many public transportation users. APTA officials could not be reached immediately for comment. Harry A. Cassidy, a bus driver from Capital Area Transit Authority in Lansing, said he understands the protesters' complaints, but said making all buses accessible to the disabled makes it difficult to keep buses on schedule. Michnel Niemann, communications manager for SEMTA, said all that company’s small buses and 70 percent of its large buses are wheelchair accessible. By 1988, he said, all will be wheelchair accessible. TEXT BOX: “I think they’re afraid some of the riders don't want to ride with disabled people because some disabled people are not attractive. " - JACK WARREN SECOND PHOTO by Gary Porter (News Photo): Behind a metal police barricade that extends beyond the edges of the picture, several long rows of protesters, in wheelchairs and standing, are lined up with their backs to the building of the Westin Hotel. Some are hlding signs. Everyone is looking out toward the street. Caption reads: Disabled protesters Members of American Disabled for Accessible Public Transportation, (ADAPT) demonstrate in front of the Westin Hotel on Sunday. ADAPT members are demanding improved access for the disabled on buses and other pubic transportation. Thay attempted to disrupt the meetings of the American Public Transit Association which convened in Detroit last weekend.