Disabled Riders Rally to Denounce Shuttle Services

This time, the familiar white vans of Access Services, which provide shuttle services for 40,000 disabled people in cities throughout Los Angeles County, were not late.

“Right on time,” said Audrey Harthorn, one of nearly two dozen demonstrators in wheelchairs who temporarily laid siege to the 74-story Library Tower building in downtown Los Angeles, where the shuttle service’s office is located. “They want to get rid of us.”

Indeed.

With anger at the boiling point over Wednesday what they say are chronic lateness and poor transportation services for the disabled in communities throughout the county, Harthorn and others stood their ground against six police officers, about the same number of building security guards and two embattled employees of Access Services.

Many of the demonstrators couldn’t speak. Others couldn’t move their legs or arms.

Still, they managed to circle the doorway areas and wheel about the front of the building with enough vigor to block entrances and demand a public confrontation with managers of Access Services, which spends nearly $50 million a year providing shuttle and taxi services to the disabled.

Since the Americans With Disabilities Act went on the books in 1990, transit services for the disabled have expanded greatly. Cities with regular bus lines must provide services for the disabled as a core civil right. If passengers can’t handle money or transfers or get to bus stops, the law says they must be provided equal access to transportation.

Equal access has taken the form of specially equipped vans. Access Services, which receives money from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, operates a fleet of 450 specially equipped vans and contracts with taxi companies for 1,500 other certified vehicles.

Wednesday, what started as a carefully scripted demonstration turned into a tense standoff when police arrived and the activists--who had come from as far away as Sylmar, the San Gabriel Valley and the South Bay--refused to move their wheelchairs out of the doorways until they got satisfaction.

Among other things, they complained to the news media of being left in dark parking lots until the early hours of the morning and of being two or three hours late to work because the vans failed to pick them up at the appointed times.

Shelly Lyons and Jacqueline Horak of Access Services came down to the street for a confrontation that quickly turned emotional.

The group’s representative was Lillibeth Navarro, a local disability rights activist. Lyons seemed taken aback by that because she and Navarro have often worked together.

“Life is difficult already,” Navarro told Lyons, with tears streaming down her cheeks. “How much more? How much more can we take?”

Later, Navarro, referring to the others with her, told a reporter: “They think just because my brothers and sisters can’t talk, they can just be ignored.”

In interviews, Access Services administrators defended their record.

Jim Parker, a board member and transit executive from Norwalk, said the agency had just received a national award of merit from the American Public Transit Assn.

He acknowledged that some of the complaints were valid and promised that they would be corrected. He said the agency was in the process of changing its procedures and working with a number of new contractors to improve performance standards.

Navarro complained of being left for hours at Disneyland last weekend when a van didn’t show up. Parker acknowledged that those problems were “egregious” and “have to be fixed immediately.”

“Our on-time performance standard is 90%,” Lyons said. “That means that 10% of our trips are going to be late on any given day, due to traffic, scheduling issues, drivers getting lost, that type of thing. When you are transporting 6,000 people a day, that is a significant number of trips to be late. They shouldn’t be hours late, they should just be five, 10 minutes late.”

Lyons personally called the vans to pick the demonstrators up and take them home.