Disability and transportation advocacy
Why leaving out disability rights advocates from your coalition building is immoral, ineffective, unnecessary, and self-harming and how you can win bigger & better together
MAR 28, 2023
I regularly chat with a few disability rights advocates (and am married to one) and the topic of car reliance comes up a lot. It’s a sensitive topic, and rightly so. For many people, a privately-owned car is a connective lifeline to the world and essential to their survival. Since our society generally disregards the needs of the permanently disabled, the temporarily disabled, and the elderly; proposals for systemic change can be viewed as potentially threatening to not just their comfort, but their lives. Simply put– most systemic changes have ignored and/or harmed them, so why should they welcome new changes? (This sentiment may be shared by other historically marginalized communities as well.)
When disability rights advocates express concerns that changes to the transportation system will make their community more exclusionary to them, you cannot wave away those concerns. You can’t just point to things like adaptive bicycles, adaptive scooters, e-bikes, seniors biking in the Netherlands, bus accessibility changes, etc and say “see, it’ll all be ok,” and resolve disability rights advocates’ concerns about changes towards car-free or car-lite societies. Part of why I know it won’t work is because I’ve tried that many times (too many times to be honest)!
But leaving out disability rights advocates from the nacho plate of your coalition building is immoral, ineffective, unnecessary, and self-harming.
It’s immoral because intentionally leaving out people with disabilities from your vision of the future for your community could result in isolation, physical harm and potentially death. That’s bad.
It’s ineffective because when you leave out disability rights advocates from your coalition, you can create unnecessary extra opposition to your campaign. You also give your opposition a powerful talking point. Even if the excluded disability rights advocates don’t actively oppose your proposal, your car-centric & temporarily able-bodied opponents can still use arguments about disability access to stop you (even if it’s done in bad faith).
It’s unnecessary because there are tons of solutions that can meet your goal while also enhancing mobility options for lots of people within the extremely diverse disability community. But you can’t come in and say “here’s your solution, like it or lump it.” When building coalitions it’s a lot more productive to come in with openness and curiosity. That means saying things like, “I’d like to collaborate with you on ways to increase car-free mobility options for more people. What would that look like for you?”
And it’s self-harming because if you’re not disabled now, you might be one day. Whether from getting hit by a car, long COVID, or just the aging process, there is a high likelihood that at some point in your life you will have different physical abilities than you have now.
So, as you go about working to get that pedestrian plaza, bike lane, bus lane or other change– remember to reach out early & often to the disability rights advocates in your community. Everybody needs more and better mobility options and our current system is failing lots of people in lots of ways. By working together, we can co-create a better future for a lot more people.