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Home / Albums / Tags ADAPT + Mayor Federico Pena 3
- ADAPT (169)
Rocky Mountain News 10/26/83 Two PHOTOS (by Rocky Mountain News staff photographer David Cornwell). PHOTO 1: Close up of a man (Mark Johnson) and a woman (Renata Conrad aka Rabe) looking down at a paper, as if conferring. She is holding a microphone in her hand. Beside them sits another man. Caption reads: Mark Johnson and Renate Rabe speak at meeting with transit officials. PHOTO 2: Down a long institutional looking hallway a group of people in wheelchairs and people walking head away from the camera. caption reads: After the meeting, some in wheelchairs exit via hotel's freight elevator. [Headline] Freight elevator raises ill will at meeting By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer The dispute over access by the handicapped to public transportation crystallized Wednesday when wheelchair-bound speakers at a transit convention resisted suggestions that they use the freight elevator at the Denver Hilton to reach the upstairs meeting. “They (transit officials) told us to ride up the elevator that will later take down the garbage and trash from your lunch," Trudy Knutson of Denver told hundreds of bus and rail operators at a meeting of the American Public Transit Association. "This was ordered by ... your leadership," she told the transit operators. APTA officials said they suggest using the freight elevator because it is about 20 feet from the banquet hall where the convention was being held. They said lobby elevators were farther away and were packed with many of the convention‘s 3.500 delegates. "They were free to use whichever (elevator) they wanted." said Jack Gilstrap, APTA executive vice president. “The freight elevator is much larger. You can fit only a couple of wheelchairs in a (lobby) elevator at a time." About 50 handicapped persons from ll states and Washington, D.C., attended the convention‘s morning session as Knutson and others called on APTA to pass a resolution endorsing complete handicapped access on all public transit and other demands. Many of the disabled in the audience used the freight elevator to leave the hotel following the presentation of their demands. Gilstrap said it showed that APTA's suggestion was a practical one. However, Knutson and others said the freight elevator issue was indicative of the way many rail and bus systems treat their disabled riders as a nuisance or an afterthought. She said access to public transit is a civil right, a position many transit operators reject. "A society that puts a man on the moon can surely put a person who is in a wheelchair on a bus," Knutson said. The handicapped protesters received a boost from Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who met with the disabled outside the hotel after he spoke to the convention. "We have to design public transit to take care of everyone from (ages) 10 to 100," Young said. According to an agreement signed by APTA, handicapped groups and Mayor Federico Pena‘s office, handicapped activists were allowed limited picketing rights outside the Hilton during the convention and a 20-minute presentation during the general session Wednesday. Handicapped speakers asked for federally mandated 100 percent accessibility and a notice by APTA to bus manufacturers that its members will buy only accessible vehicles. Gilstrap said the group's demands would be referred to study groups and a resolution considered late. APTA has resisted 100 percent accessibility requirement because wheelchair lifts, elevators and other equipment are expensive and the number of handicapped riders is comparatively low. "It's tough to put money into services that aren't used" Gilstrap said. “It's a manager's dilemma. It‘s used so lightly that it‘s almost ridiculous." For example, Gilstrap said the Regional Transportation District is one of the leaders in handicapped transportation with 50 percent of its buses accessible during peak hours and 100 percent accessible off-peak. Yet, in 1982, he said, each of those buses averaged only 25 handicapped trips per year. Gilstrap said special van service where handicapped riders call in advance and get picked up at home is a better, albeit expensive, idea. "At least the money spent is spent on carrying people,“ he said. Denver also offers demand service. The trips-per year average is 1,490, making it far more popular than regular bus service. Handicapped groups believe van service is unconstitutional because it is separate but equal service. - ADAPT (487)
The Handicapped Coloradan ADAPT wins transit access VlCTORY! Federal court orders all new buses to be equipped w|th wheelchair lifts APTA pressures DOT to appeal decision Feb. 13,1989. Call it V-D Day. Victory over the Department of Transportation (DOT). Or call it V-A Day. Victory over the American Public Transit Association (APTA). Because on that day in Philadelphia, within earshot of the Liberty Bell and walking distance of the hall in which the Declaration of Independence was forged, disabled Americans won not only the right but the means to ride mainline public transportation. On a 2-l vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that in the future every transit system in the nation that buys buses with assistance from the DOT must purchase only buses equipped with wheelchair lifts. That decision reverses a 1988 ruling by U.S. District Judge Harold Katz who upheld DOT’s policy of allowing transit systems the “local option" of providing public transit to people with disabilities through a paratransit system. APTA, which reaffirmed its support of local option at its last national convention, has urged DOT to appeal the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Such an appeal must be filed within 90 days, or by May 13, 1989. DOT already has filed for a rehearing, and the court is expected to announce by March 29 if they would be willing to reconsider the decision. Justices Carol Los Mansmann and A. Leon Higginbotham wrote the maiority opinion with Judge Morton Greenber dissenting. The case was brought to the Court of Appeals by a dozen disability rights organizations, led by the militant American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (ADAPT) and the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans of America. Timothy M. Cook, director of the newly formed National Disability Action Center, argued the case. It wasn't the first time wheelchair lifts have been in the courts. in 1979, the DOT, at the direction of President Jimmy Carter, ordered all transit systems to install lifts on new buses, but that mandate was struck down in federal court after an appeal by APTA. APTA’s insistence on local option led to the creation of ADAPT by a handful of militant wheelchair users in Denver, who set up pickets outside the Hilton Hotel headquarters of APTA's I983 national convention. At the insistence of Mayor Federico Pena, ADAPT was allowed to speak before the convention and no arrests were made. That was the last time either situation would exist. At every subsequent national convention or regional APTA meeting, wheelchair militants have shown up in force, blocking buses and hotel entrances until local police forces were forced to cart them away to jail. “Who would have thought a bunch of ragbag crips from Denver could have started something that would have grown this big?" asked ADAPT founder Wade Blank, co-director of the Atlantis Community, a local independent living agency. Both Blank and Cook cautioned that the war was not over yet, although both said they were pleased that the 73-page court opinion was filled with the language of the civil rights movement and would go a long way toward convincing those on the fence that their cause was just. The Court of Appeals opinion reads, in part: “We find the goal of eradicating the ‘invisibility of the handicapped‘ led Congress to enact measures to facilitate, if not immediate and complete mainstreaming of the handicapped, then affirmative and aggressive steps in that direction." The decision involves only new buses, as the justices argued that requiring systems to retrofit old buses would subject them to "undue burdens." Cook said after the decision was handed down that the "opinion is completely consistent with President Bush's call last week, in his speech before Congress, for Americans with disabilities to be ‘in the economic mainstream.‘ Nothing is more essential to meeting that goal than the provision of accessible public transportation." Mike Auberger of the Denver ADAPT chapter, who's been arrested in several cities while engaging in civil disobedience, agreed that accessible public transit is the key to enabling disabled people assume full citizenship. "People are dying out there," Auberger said. "Disabled people go into nursing homes because they don't have any options. I personally know people who have committed suicide because they don‘t have any options. Wheelchair lifts will give them that option." Auberger said that ADAPT doesn't plan to rest on its laurels. They'll be Reno April 7-ll for a regional APTA convention and back in Denver April 23-26 for the national meeting of the Urban Mass Transit Association (UMTA). “Our demand is simple," Auberger said. “We just want them to drop the appeal process and accept the decision." If they don't, Auberger promised that protesters would try to fill the jails one more time. To that end, ADAPT members intend to picket DOT offices in 12 cities on Good Friday, March 24, and ask staff members there to call the Presidiential assistant in charge of transportation matters and ask that the court decision not be appealed. "If they don't make the call, then we don't go," Auberger said. "I'm sure we'll take some heat because we're doing it on Good Friday," he said, explaining that he expects many offices to be shorthanded because of workers leaving early for the Easter weekend. "That should just add to the confusion." - ADAPT (599)
PHOTO: An African American woman in a motorized wheelchair sits in front of a group of other people in wheelchairs and standing. Several are wearing ADAPT no stairs logo T-shirts. The woman in front has a sign across the front of the wheelchair that says "Access Now. We will Ride." They are on a city street in an urban downtown area. Caption says: SINCE 1983, ADAPT has picketed APTA is national and regional conventions, always an unwelcome guest. Scores of demonstrators have been arrested hundreds of times as they blocked the entrances to APTA's various hotel headquarters in such cities, as Denver, Detroit, Montreal, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Cincinnati, San Antonio, and Reno. Only once, in Denver in 1983, was ADAPT allowed to make its plea for accessible public transit before an APTA meeting, and then only after the city's mayor, Federico Pena, intervened. APTA insisted throughout the demonstrations that they weren't opposed to lifts per se, only to making the lifts mandatory on all public transit systems. APTA argued that it was a matter best decided by local transit providers.