[Headline] Disabled push for bus access

By Constance Johnson
Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

Ken Heard gets few things without a struggle.

His speech is slurred. When he talks, his wheelchair-bound body contorts until he finally spills out the sentence. He needs three attendants to make it through a day.

Heard, who was born with cerebral palsy, also needs a wheelchair lift to ride a bus.

Today, he will ask the Colorado Civil Rights Commission to make Greyhound Lines Inc. put lifts on their buses so that he and 20,000 other wheelchair-bound people in the state can ride them.

Heard knows the hearing is just the first round of another lengthy battle.

"What I want and what they're going to do are two different things," Heard said. "I want them to put it in black and white that they will buy a wheelchair-accessible buses from now on. They're not going to do that. They don't want to do that."

A spokesman for Greyhound Lines in Dallas said the company already provides a Helping Hand program for disabled people, which allows the companion of a disabled person to ride for free.

"We think this program works well in most cases," said George Gravely.

But Wade Blank, co-director of the Atlantis Community, a disabled-rights organization in Denver, said that often a disabled person has to pay a companion at least $5 an hour. If Greyhound refuses to put lifts on buses, then Blank wants the company to pay the travel cost for disabled people who can't use the bus service.

Atlantis gained a national reputation by forcing the Regional Transportation District to make its buses wheelchair-accessible through protests during the late 1970s and early '80s.

Blank said that while the Greyhound program works for disabled people who use a manual wheelchair, people like Heard are out of luck because Greyhound does not provide for battery-powered wheelchairs.

Gravely said the law prohibits the company from [text cuts off for image]

[image]

[image caption] Ken Heard is seeking a requirement that Greyhound buses have lifts for wheelchairs. Frank Murray/Rocky Mountain News

[text resumes] allowing battery-powered wheelchairs on buses because of the chemicals in the batteries. But he said the company could provide manual wheelchairs for passengers.

Heard and others said it comes down to civil rights. Heard gets about $370 a month in Social Security benefits and $65 a month from his job with Atlantis as an organizer.

Created on

Wednesday 24 July 2013

Posted on

Wednesday 9 October 2019

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