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People With Disabilities Deliver Message

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

From across the city, they arrived using walkers, wheelchairs or canes.

In sometimes painfully slow speech, the message was repeated passionately Thursday to the city’s Commission on Disability: We often feel like second-class citizens on buses, cabs and other public transportation.

Cabs refuse to stop for the blind with seeing-eye dogs, all bus lifts can’t accommodate all wheelchairs, and many transit services run hours late, stranding clients in the rain and late at night.

At a public hearing Thursday that lasted more than five hours, the city’s Commission on Disability heard plenty of tales of missed doctor’s appointments and late arrivals at jobs.

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Commissioners also questioned the city’s Department of Transportation, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and other transit groups about why the disabled are not better served.

Those agencies said they are working to improve services, including imposing a requirement that all city cabs post plaques in Braille listing the operator’s name and number so that complaints can be tracked.

One announcement did draw enthusiastic applause from the audience:

Starting in September, the MTA will give free rides to the disabled and their personal care attendants on all MTA bus and rail lines, including subway and light rail. To be eligible, those riders must be certified by Access Services, the agency that coordinates county transit for them.

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Much of Thursday’s testimony, however, was from speakers who said a lot of work still needed to be done a decade after the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act was signed. Some zipped up to the podium in electric wheelchairs, others gingerly made their way with walkers and canes. One woman rolled up to the microphone cradling a toddler in her lap, with diaper bags and a water bottle hanging from the back of her wheelchair.

Steve Remington, who has cerebral palsy, was recently stranded at his job. Instead of a van taking him home, a cab was sent by Access Services, but it couldn’t accommodate his wheelchair, said Terri Lantz, a manager at the Westside branch of United Cerebral Palsy. Lantz helped Remington address commissioners because his speech has been impaired by his condition.

After trying several transit options, none of which panned out, Lantz said that three hours after Remington’s scheduled pickup, in exasperation she called his family to pick him up.

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“Do you see what this does to us?” asked Suzanne Cohen, a Hollywood resident who uses a wheelchair and has slurred speech as a result of a spinal cord injury. Even getting to the hearing was a hassle for Cohen, who said one downtown DASH bus, operated by the city’s Department of Transportation, couldn’t take her heavy motorized wheelchair. She had to wait for another.

The blind and vision-impaired often face hurdles in reporting problems like cabs refusing to serve them and their service dogs. However, the new Braille plaques should be in all city taxis within three weeks, said Donald Mansion, of the city’s Transportation Department. The cab companies, he said, are paying for the plaques. Other taxi problems can be reported to (213) 580-1244.

Currently just 2% of the city’s cabs, or about 160, are accessible to the disabled, he said.

Commissioner Elizabeth Helms of Sun Valley said that for the disabled, transportation is the most difficult problem to solve. The commission decided to convene a public hearing on the issue because it is consistently an issue among residents, she said.

It has also been the impetus for policy-changing litigation in the county.

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In 1998, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed the MTA discriminated against disabled bus riders, violating the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The suit cited chronic problems with wheelchair lifts on some southeastern county buses, and drivers who would pass up riders because they didn’t know how to operate the devices. A federal judge later ordered the MTA to repair the equipment and train drivers.

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Because of that suit, the MTA has taken many steps, including better self-monitoring with undercover staffers posing as the disabled to test ride systems and audit operators, said Antonio Chavira, an MTA superintendent.

“Access is a window to an opportunity on life,” explained Lantz, flanked by several of her cerebral palsy clients in wheelchairs.

“To get to college, to get to jobs. It’s like the right to [free] speech.”

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