Agencies Settle Freeway Call Box Suit

Emergency call boxes may be a godsend to most motorists stranded on the freeway, but not to Carol Anne Wright.

She had to get out of her wheelchair and crawl, on her hands and knees, across a gravel-topped island to get to one after her car broke down on the San Diego Freeway.

And then she couldn’t reach it. It was so high on the pole that she had to prop herself up in the broiling midday summer sun just to reach the receiver, only to find that it was broken.

That was seven years ago.

Since then she has been working to make sure it never happens again. This week, four government agencies settled a class-action lawsuit filed in behalf of Wright--who suffers from multiple sclerosis--and three other wheelchair-using or deaf plaintiffs. The agencies--the California Department of Transportation, the California Highway Patrol, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the county Service Authority for Freeway Emergencies--all play some role in operating the call boxes.

They will have to spend well more than $11 million to make all 4,200 call boxes in the county accessible to wheelchair users, mostly by creating breaches in the traffic islands or curbs that surround them. And they will have to upgrade the boxes so they can accommodate deaf motorists and the tiny Teletype-like machines they use to communicate by phone.

The settlement “is, as far as we know, the first of its kind,” said Eve Hill, director of the Western Law Center for Disability Rights, which filed the lawsuit.

Elizabeth G. Chilton, a lawyer for the MTA and other defendants, said the call boxes were installed long before the Americans With Disabilities Act required local governments to guarantee access to public services. The agencies will begin making the boxes accessible to wheelchair users as soon as the settlement is formally approved by a Superior Court judge July 22.

Already, she said, the agencies have begun making the call boxes accessible to the hearing-impaired.

“We think it is a fair and reasonable compromise, and that it is in the best interests of all parties,” Chilton said. “ I think it is certainly going to improve the system [and] make it accessible to many more people.”

Hill said she hopes the settlement will establish a precedent around the state, where each county is responsible for the operation of call boxes in its jurisdiction.

But Hill said the call box fight is just one small battle in a much larger campaign to secure disabled people’s access to facilities and services that able-bodied people take for granted everyday.

Currently, government buildings are required to have wheelchair access, and most pay phones are required to have the kind of text-based communication that deaf people can use--even though Hill says those mandates are routinely violated. She should know: As a former lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department Disability Rights Section, she was responsible for enforcing the disabilities act.

“Everybody is violating the law,” Hill said.

The legal advocacy group will now turn its sights to the myriad other ways in which the disabled are being discriminated against in terms of access, Hill said. She added that most streets in Los Angeles lack the kind of “curb cuts” or ramps that make it possible for wheelchairs users to get onto and off of streets, even at intersections and crosswalks.

Many taxis cannot accommodate wheelchairs, she said, and even though public buses and subway cars are required to have lifts for wheelchair users, 20% to 50% of the buses in Los Angeles have inoperable equipment, she said, citing a city report.

And the list of buildings that are not required to be accessible to wheelchair users remains long--including private businesses, doctors’ offices, schools, movie theaters and stadiums.

“It is an enormous task,” Hill said. “We have plenty to do. I have job security.”

For now, though, as many as 100,000 motorists in Los Angeles County--those using wheelchairs or who are deaf--will see a dramatic improvement in access to an important public service.

For Wright, a feisty 49-year-old law school graduate and former teacher, the settlement is satisfying more for others, she says, than for herself.

As her condition has worsened from the neuromuscular disease, Wright has had to stop working for fear of losing medical benefits. But in her travels, she has seen many others far worse off than she. People who are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being stranded somewhere and not being able to call for help.

“It is hideous the way that we treat people with disabilities as a class,” Wright said Thursday. “How many times have there been other people who can’t get to the call boxes?”