where CAN I SIT?
the #detroit free press press provided another stellar example about the fractured way the auto industry is going about design and testing of autonomous, and/or #self-driving vehicles. Names and players won’t be mentioned here because this type of article is neither novel or unique to that publication. Here’s the formula.
A car builder or testing facility (almost anyone involved in the process) takes a limited group of people out for a demonstration ride. The reporter talks with the leadership and some of the riders and things seem to be progressing and no firm answers are given as to when all this will be available (except for Tesla who knows when everything is going to happen).
I imagine all these players in the game watching each other’s progress and trying to determine when the consumer viability tipping point will come. You know that point where enough people will buy the first ones of these and the fear will go away (which it will),
Yet….. none of these reporters or riders, or engineers, or praisers orcriticsseeem to be people with disabilities or seniors—you know people who don’t have adequate access to transportation now.
There seems to be a lot of tables where these folks (I’m one of them could be sitting. We could be at the design table. We could be at the development and testing table> We could be at the regulation and safety table. We could be at the financing table (someone issuing to have to get money to buy these cars).
Well my point is this. None of the press has been asking “where can people with disabilitiies sit? What table would be the best ones for inclusive thinking and access to be discussed? It appears we are all too focused on the function of the individual cars and not the function of the industry. What is this function? Well if we are going to have productive participants in our society and capitalize on the expertise of people who use technology every single day. Who uses a lot of technology to solve every day problems? Oh yeah, people with disabilities. Most of us have grown up using assistive tech and stretching it to its limits not for a few years but for lifetimes.
If there are any groups in this country who are acutely aware of functional barriers and solutions it is the elderly and the people with disabilities. Most of the people who are at the table now have created the vehicles we have now and are limited to thinking with all their body parts so to speak. so the tendency will be to seek the solutions in the same places they have always come from. That’s called being a human being. The argument here is that the solutions are in other places and the people with them are not being invited to the table.
Many of us are ready to make transportation in this country and around the world inclusive, safe, efficient, and I dar say it fun…so get us at your tables now. Let us share our expertise. If you don’t µaybe your lawyers and engineers can fix things later when you have built inaccessible vehicles and systems again…. but that seems sort of a waste of time and money. So find us some seats now and avoid all this for both of us.
Sometimes the easiest way is the best way and this is one of those times.
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