The Handicapped Coloradan
vol.7, No 6 Boulder, Colorado January 1985

[comic]
[no comic caption]

[Headline] $300 Versus $10 Trip Sparks PUC Hearing

Like a lot of other young adults living away from home, Ernie Butts wanted to go home to spend the Christmas holidays with his parents.

But Butts is severely handicapped and uses an electric wheelchair for mobility. He can't climb the stairs onto a Continental Trailways bus, and neither Trailways nor its primary competitor Greyhound are willing to build wheelchair lifts in their buses.

So Butts approached Denver Mobility, a non-profit paratransit agency that transports people in wheelchair vans, who said they could take him from Denver to Colorado Springs--for $300 a round trip.

The same trip on Continental Trailways costs an able-bodied rider less than $10.

A local wheelchair activist group the AmericanDisabled for Public Transit (ADAPT), has asked the Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to hold a hearing on the matter. ADAPT wants the PUC "to take a moral stand that services provided for the public serve all the citizens with the price of a fare without discrimination."
ADAPT estimates that there are 20,000 wheelchair users in the Denver area (90 percent of whom are in the low income category) who are prohibited from traveling by bus.

ADAPT requested that the PUC "deny the bus companies' request for rate hikes until they have wheelchair accessible buses that can serve everyone."

Most of the major bus manufacturers have refused to build lifts into such over the road coaches.

Created on

Wednesday 24 July 2013

Posted on

Wednesday 9 October 2019

Albums

• Greyhound - We Will Ride the Dirty Dog

Visits

367

Rating score

no rate

Rate this photo