Disabled Parking Spaces

Many people view the "International Symbol of Access" (that familiar blue and white wheelchair symbol) as discriminatory because its ubiquitous use on disabled toilets, elevators, train carriages and countless other places has created the somewhat false perception that only wheelchair users are really disabled. With the specter of welfare cuts looming ever nearer in Britain and all around the globe, it's more important than ever right now for bloggers such as myself to shout from the rooftops that just because a person isn't visibly disabled doesn't mean he or she is not.

Having said that, there is one place where, in my opinion, "disabled" should predominantly mean "wheelchair user", and that's the disabled parking space.

This isn't the time to yet again condemn the minority of able-bodied motorists who selfishly park in disabled spaces because they can't be bothered to walk the length of a car park. Those people are generally condemned by society already.

In fact, it was just last week, when driving to an outdoor swimming pool north of Brisbane, that I learnt something wonderful but not at all surprising about Queenslanders. It was a hot Saturday afternoon during the school summer holidays and, consequently, a lot of people had had the same idea as me and my friends. When we arrived, the small car park near the pool resembled a motorway during rush hour, with desperate drivers taking all sorts of risks to secure their place in the sun. Vehicles were parked on every available bit of space - on the grass, up the curbs - and yet not one person sneakily took the sole remaining disabled space which I was able to use. Such integrity I am not accustomed to back in England, I regret to say.

Thankfully, I haven't been forced to use a regular parking space on many occasions during my nearly 8 years of being on the road, but those few occasions were extremely awkward nevertheless. On one occasion, a driver parked so close to the driver's side door of my car that I couldn't approach it in my wheelchair. This meant that I had to enter through the passenger door and lift my 14kg wheelchair over my head and place it behind the driver's seat where it belonged. Then there was the time I had to actually get out of my wheelchair, practically crawl along the wet tarmac to my car, and then reverse and hoist the chair in - with a queue of impatient motorists watching and waiting for me to move.

Let me point out an obvious fact about disabled spaces. Observe the fairly typical one below:

What do you notice about it? How does it compare to a regular parking space? It's much larger, right? It's enclosed in a box section that has, in my opinion, but one purpose: to allow disabled drivers and passengers enough room to fully open their doors and get in and out of their wheelchairs. It's as simple as that.

And yet, in the nine years I've been driving, I can count on just two hands the number of times I've witnessed a wheelchair user getting in or out of a car that was parked in a disabled space. I often see people with a limp, people on crutches, often old people, but hardly ever someone for whom that type of space was actually designed.

But then, I'm biased. It's easy for me to write all this, me being a life-long wheelchair user. Let me, therefore, briefly mention the case of my good friend, Gerry, who had great difficulty renewing his blue badge a few years ago, despite the fact that his mobility is clearly affected by polio. His difficulty convincing the authorities might well have been be due the sort of biased argument I am promoting here in this blog.

Gerry does not have a wheelchair, but often uses a walking stick when out and about. Naturally, I believe Gerry deserves to use a special parking space, just as I do, to make his life easier, and yet I also believe there should be two kinds of disabled space - one for wheelchairs and another for non-wheelchair disabled people - and that Gerry should use the latter. Apparently such schemes exist already, but they are rare. I've certainly never seen one.

Because it's true that no two disabilities are identical. Some need a wheelchair to get around, and some do not; some need braille to operate an elevator and some don't; some need a large disabled parking space that's close to the shop entrance, and some do not. Disagree with me if you wish, but disabled spaces in their current form should only be available to wheelchair users.

Experiences With Prosthetics

Watching a few minutes of the Paralympics earlier today, I was amazed by some of the prosthetic limbs on show. We all know what Oscar Pistorius's blades look like, of course, but there are now prosthetics for arms, legs, feet and hands - colourful ones, plain ones and all of them made from carbon-fiber or titanium, or whatever material the sporting event requires. 

It was a different story when I was young.

The Paralympics, in terms of how prosthetic limbs can aid disabled people in living their daily lives, or indeed achieving their dreams, are actually at the opposite end of the spectrum to my own negative experiences. I spent the first five years of my life travelling fruitlessly between hospitals because it was the official policy that I should be retrofitted with a pair of artificial legs; that the NHS should, as it were, provide what God had left out.

Our journeys down to Roehampton Hospital in London and the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford were long and difficult for my mum and me, as we lived in Redcar at that time. Dad usually had to work and so it was just us two and a large pram. Actually, 'Roehampton' is a word that's now seared permanently onto my brain, like 'Dunblane' - a bit disproportionate, I know, but I was a kid and hospitals were eating up my life.

No doubt I spent a lot less time in hospitals over the course of my childhood than other disabled people did, and I count myself truly fortunate for that. Nevertheless, one of my earliest and most vivid memories was of a doctor's dry, gloveless hands probing my naked rear end, feeling for bones and so on.

As I wrote in my previous blog post, 'Paralympics and Political Correctness', I met a Paralympian named Peter Hull when I was a baby, or, more accurately, he met me. What I didn't write, though, is that this man had been asked by the hospital to bring his various prostheses along - so that he could model them for my parents - but ended up leaving them at home. His reason for doing so was that life was often easier without them. And for a man who was born without arms or legs, that really says something about the usefulness of some prosthetics, doesn't it?

But the doctors weren't to be denied. They knew what was best for me. They assured my parents that prosthetic legs would give me a semblance of normality and independence in my formative years and that they'd even help me to make friends at school. However, the simple truth was that my having no legs was a comfortable reality; my being practically welded into a pair of stiff, plastic things was not. I have no doubt that the doctors meant well, but disability is a very subjective reality for which there should never be a one-size-fits-all approach.

So they made me sit for an hour in slimy, wet plaster and prescribed me a pair of all singing, all dancing artificial legs - and crutches, of course. They weren't the first legs I'd sat in (see the cute video of me below), but they were the first that had been designed for my personal 'needs'. However, because I don't have enough bone in my thighs, they weren't the kind of legs that I could swing back and forth like Pistorius's blades, a fact that immediately trashed all the doctors' promises of independence. They were uncomfortable to sit in and exhausting to use for extended periods. I mostly used them for class photographs and to 'walk' laboriously around the school grounds at lunch time when I really should have been playing happily in my wheelchair with all those friends the legs were supposed to win for me.

Actually, the friendship I developed with my special needs helper in Primary School, Mrs Jones - whose job it was to walk behind me with her arms outstretched in the likely event of me toppling over - was probably one of the most rewarding of my youth. If you look closely at the picture above, you'll see that Mrs Hughes (in the teal jumper) is trying to look natural while grabbing my jumper to stabilise me. Some cure.

'Walking' longer distances like from my home to school was out of the question. What, then, was the practical purpose of those legs? I sometimes wonder whether, in cases like mine, prosthetics exist more for the benefit of the able bodied than the disabled. Are they designed to help people who were born without limbs to live their daily lives, or to spare everyone else the potential discomfort of coming to terms with them? A bit of both, perhaps? Surely it's less awkward for a shop assistant to serve someone who appears on the face of things to be 'normal'; easier, too, for a disabled person's colleagues to concentrate on their work when they can't glance across the desk at his or her stump every five minutes. Of course, this will often be to disabled peoples' advantage also, especially if their prostheses have a genuine practical use.

My chief complaint about the system I grew up with was that it seemed to be trying to create a society where everyone, on the face of things at least, had a full set of limbs and oddities simply weren't visible. What it should have been doing was accepting that, for people such as myself, there really is no cure for disability, only much-needed improvements to things like wheelchairs and public transport. Lord knows how much taxpayer money was wasted on consultants for my case and the building of a pair of legs that probably ended up on a scrapheap somewhere. I don't even remember what became of them.

But here we are in 2012 and all those prostheses on the television aren't fashion accessories; they're ground-breaking pieces of technology that are allowing Paralympians and regular disabled people alike to do that they do. And with scientists developing more and more reliable robotic limbs that can be operated by peoples' brains, the future's looking very promising indeed. Unless your name's Sarah Connor, that is.