Light as the Best Disinfectant

So, seeing as the peanut gallery back here is going to have to pick up the slack, let’s have some “fun” at the expense of LADOT today.

Many of you know that I’m in a wheelchair, which makes the whole car-free thing interesting at times. I moved here from Boston, where ADA access seems to only be a suggestion, and have largely done well here; the two primary systems I use, Metro and Santa Monica, are both very much on top of things.

But LADOT’s DASH service has been slow on the uptake. I work in the City Hall area, so I take the DASH D back up to Union Station for the Metro Purple Line, rather than hiking all the way up the hill to Civic Center. And in the evening, there’s one driver (elderly hispanic gentleman with striking white hair) who just seems to have issues with the wheelchair. He’s twice claimed that the bus was too full (once slamming the door on some poor old lady to demonstrate that it was “full”). I call LADOT, get a call back from a friendly enough fellow assuring me that something’s going to be done, and a week or so goes by when I don’t see this jerk, so I don’t really have anything else to complain about.

And then today, well, today sure took the prize. This guy, who ostensibly has a California CDL, was able to pull up to the curb to get the front door close enough for people to board. But the ramp’s in the back, and he claimed that he couldn’t get the back close enough to the curb. Now there’s so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to begin.

#1: If he can get the front door up to the curb, all he has to do is pull forward and edge slightly left so as to not wipe out the curb. And I know this without ever driving in my life!
#2: If he has a CDL, he can handle pulling up to a curb. If he can’t, then he shouldn’t have a CDL. Yes, this is a tautology, but it’s a rare useful one.

Not only that, he’s so confident that he’s not going to get in trouble for this that he willingly gives me his badge number (#8228, if anyone is curious or has the capacity to act on this information).

So I call LADOT again today, and this time I’m pretty angry. This is the third time this one driver has refused to pick me up (of four times seeing him, he’s only picked me up once). LADOT’s aware of the situation, but seems to be refusing to do anything about it. Frankly, I’m now somewhat jaded at LADOT’s ostensible attempts to deal with this, so I’d love to see what other participants have to say. I find myself very disappointed, because, as I’ve said, no matter how many… interesting… Metro bus drivers I’ve run into, I’ve never met one who has refused to take the wheelchair for a bad reason (there’s always the rare situation where the person in the wheelchair seats refuses to move, and Metro sensibly has a policy that drivers can’t physically remove them - it’s a frustrating situation for everyone when that happens).

So, thus the question: Why can such a large and unwieldy system like Metro handle this when LADOT seems to be uninterested in providing ADA access?