Whether you commute to work by driving or taking a metro or a bus, you probably take for granted that, however long your commute may be, at least it’s generally feasible. For Americans in the disabled community, that’s not always the case.
Traditional options, such as paratransit, make commuting difficult and inflexible for people with disabilities. They can weigh on taxpayers as well — for decades they have weighed on the budget of the Washington, D.C., Metro system. In this sphere, innovations are much needed.
“You can’t afford to have people who want to work not work because of issues like transportation,” said Neil Romano, chairman of the National Council on Disability. “If they don’t have those basic rights, that limits what they can do. That is not good for any economy, not good for any country.”
On Tuesday, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao announced a plan to channel nearly $50 million toward access and mobility initiatives, including grants to inventors who make self-driving cars more accessible and communities that find ways to get disabled people all the way to their destinations, even with stops and transfers. The department reports that it has increased investment in accessibility-related research by about 50% over the past three years.
Autonomous vehicles, for example, could be transformative for the disabled community. According to industry experts, it’s already time to seize that opportunity.
“In the past, disability access was an afterthought,” said Marc Scribner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Now, it’s going front and center.
“Transportation is often a boring and slow conservative sector,” Scribner added, “and now we’re seeing this innovation on the horizon that could really upend a lot of how we have traditionally thought about these kinds of networks and services.”
Baruch Feigenbaum, the assistant director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, said one solution is for the government to look into public-private partnerships. In Boston, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation partnered with Uber and Lyft to provide transportation to commuters in wheelchairs. After the initiative began, Feigenbaum said, customer satisfaction skyrocketed.
As for self-driving cars, a U.S. DOT representative said the government can do two things. First, it can fund research and provide grant challenges to encourage innovation. Second, it can roll back needless regulations which, rather than ensuring safety, only add more red tape.
“This shift toward automation can be a real game-changer for surface transportation in ways that we haven’t seen, in innovation like this or a revolution like this, in 100 years,” Scribner said. “That’s why transportation folks are so excited.”
