In the news

Yers. That's if you even bother trying in the first place. Where the fuck are you going to flag them down? Stand outside the building you were in and hope one goes past? Try to wave one down from knee-height by the side of a main road with people twice your height surrounding you? Not bloody likely. It's a bit like buses - they're all kitted out to be wheelchair-friendly but you hardly ever see anyone getting on them with a wheelchair, and it's not because there's hardly anybody in the city who needs a wheelchair, it's because they're still a massive ballache to use even with their fuzzy little headboards and their kneeling step.

I was being slightly facetious in my response to Apollo though, but that's because his question was facetious. Of course I wasn't saying all disabled people are poor, that would be absurd. They are, however, twice as likely to be living in poverty than people without a disability, so they're even less likely to be able to get cabs everywhere than "normal" people are, and "normal" people are priced out of the things themselves. Of course there are people with disabilities who aren't poor, I'm one. But it's not so very long ago that I was one of those disability-linked poverty statistics myself, and it's purely through the whims of chance that's no longer the case.

I didn't understand the whole buses thing until a few months ago when my partner started working in a carehome scheme thing for disabled people who are in that "almost 24/7 care" grey area in that they need help daily and need someone on call but aren't considered 24/7 so need to share staff. She started having to take them out but more with the instruction to be there and let them do things as much and as independantly as possible. Her observations on buses had been that request stops will be ignored so often it was "easier" to go to another stop, another tactic by drivers is to claim the ramps are broken, when they did eventually get on a bus the driver would radio in a delay and the route would often cut short and then the next bus would become full as all the able passengers boarded first and they would have to wait ages before they got going again. Lastly the levels of animosity are fucking huge, everyone gives disgusted looks when someone takes a minute to find an oyster card let alone the whole ramp up/down ordeal.