What’s one or 2%?

IT’S ONLY 2%

Veteran wheelchair users  can tell you horror  stories about  getting hauled aboard commercial  air carriers and watching out the window as their  mobility  devices get tossed around  by cargo handlers.  Oh sure the airlines usually  pay for  any damages and  provide  substitute equipment from time to time, however wheelchairs and scooters are fitted  for individual users, have features based on  the ways to optimize  independence for those users and  are not cheap so users don’t usually  have two or three spares chairs  sitting around while they wait  on the airlines.

Now I would invite  the Self-Driving  car crowd to consider the following….. a recent  study conducted in the first two months of this year noted that in one month the rate of damaged or “lost”  mobility equipment was  2% of all devices.  What’s  2%?  

Well let’s just say that for  every one  hundred  passengers  getting on  the plane United  or American  would institute  a “break the legs of passengers  99 and 100.  

What?  Would that be acceptable?  If two out of  100 passengers  got on the plane able to  get around independently and then  when they got off the plane they  no longer could  move through the airport or out  on the street—get to their job?  I think something would  happen  pretty quickly.  Unfortunately, I’m sure that some airlines learning of this news will “institute policies.”  

The trouble  is that there will be no rush to have people with disabilities  actually come and train employees  how to handle this  equipment.  There won’t be thoughts  like ‘what if the  pilot was a chair user and couldn’t get on or off the plane?  

Well what does this have to  do with self-driving?  It’s simple really.  Planes were not designed to  allow freedom for people with disabilities and the results are evident.  Car makers  have a chance to avoid that mistake and many, many, more  and all they  need to do is involve people with disabilities into the design and implementation phases  of their  products.  

So—sometimes you can learn from your mistakes and sometimes  you can learn from someone else  mistakes… 

How about  we make this the latter.