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Here’s a challenge for Calgary city council and managers of malls and grocery stores: try to navigate a winter city with crutches or a wheelchair or walker. Then come and tell me how safe you are.
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Maybe you can call me from your hospital bed because you fell trying to get out of a car onto bare pavement. And if any of you are brave enough to brag about how quickly this city clears the roads, where do you think all the snow turns to ice? It piles up on the curb, making life miserable for pedestrians and treacherous for the disabled.
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As for private parking lots around malls and other public buildings, you don’t do such a hot job either. The roads and sidewalks are bare, but what brainless idiot didn’t think removing ice from handicapped parking spots was a smart move? I speak from experience and those tasked with removing snow and ice can consider the consequences of their actions. There are dozens if not hundreds of reports of falls and injuries among the elderly. Many involve broken bones; some are life-changing or life-ending.
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My elderly husband uses a walker, and while I won’t directly check the locations involved, I have no reason to believe that any other place would do a better job. Three times in the past week I’ve had to help him negotiate ice buildup in handicapped parking lots around the city, including grocery stores and a doctors’ office complex. If anyone has encountered the latter paradox, join the club. But then, doctors, nurses, lab technicians and pharmacists don’t manage parking facilities. That is left to private contractors. At a minimum, no disabled user shall encounter accumulated snow and/or ice in areas specifically designed and set aside for their use. What good is a huge stall when it’s piled high with ice and snow?
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We were lucky that my husband didn’t fall. We managed to get to the bare pavement without damage. Surprisingly all the sidewalks are bare. Not the parking lots.
What irritates me the most is the lack of thought. Has no one in charge thought of this problem?
It’s the kind of question that fit people never seem to ask themselves. Those who clear city streets and leave a pile of frozen snow on the curb seem to have no idea how a pedestrian feels about the obstacle, let alone how a disabled person manages.
Where are the voices of politicians like former members of Parliament and federal cabinet ministers Steven Fletcher of Winnipeg and Kent Hehr of Calgary — both quadriplegics — and the late Percy Wickman? During their time in the public eye, they brought a measure of public conscience without having to speak: their wheelchairs said it for them. As for Wickman, who died in 2004, he was a vocal advocate for people with disabilities and served on Edmonton city council from 1977 to 1986.
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This city has belatedly learned that six-inch curbs pose no problem for the able-bodied but are a hindrance to anyone using a wheelchair. When automatic doors open instead of in, how does a wheelchair user manage?
This is not a new and unknown problem, so there is no excuse for this winter city. How can I know? In 1978, Calgary Herald reporters Dave Margoshes and I, along with photographer Terry Cioni, spent a day to see how easy it was for wheelchair users to navigate this city. “Easy” does not compute. Even though regulations spell out the need for ramps, the federal building where Revenue Canada has its offices is impossible for a wheelchair to enter. The central library is accessible but there are no accessible bathrooms. This was almost the case in downtown Calgary 44 years ago.
We wrote at the time: “The resistance to making the architectural and engineering changes necessary to make people in wheelchairs feel completely at home is in a classic Catch-22 situation. Businesses are not want to spend money for a virtually non-existent segment of their clientele, but customers in wheelchairs don’t come because there aren’t enough facilities for them.
All these decades later, the freedom of the disabled, the blind, the disabled, the handicapped and the elderly is still being ignored.
Catherine Ford is a regular columnist for the Calgary Herald.
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