41 Transportation

In addition to the accessibility provisions of Article 9, Article 20 of the UN CRPD aims to ensure personal mobility with the greatest possible independence for persons with disabilities.^[1]  Many adults with disabilities require specialized transportation services, including accessible buses and taxis, to get around their community.  They may also need assistance with planning trips and navigating public transportation systems.  Many also use active transportation pathways and infrastructure (e.g. via adaptive bicycles, quadracycles, mobility scooters, wheelchairs, and so on).

There are many ways in which transportation, including the design of streets, sidewalks, and public transit systems, presents barriers.  The very fact that North American cities are designed to be automobile-oriented is a source of countless barriers, and is also a contributor to a variety of health problems, some resulting in disability. When viewed through the social lens of disability, our dependence on driving is a failure of urban and transportation planning (or its acquiescence to political and market forces that lead to auto-oriented communities).^[2] Many Canadians with disabilities are transport-captive; a national issue that is particularly acute in smaller isolated communities in the Mid-North, Far North and throughout most of Western Canada.^[3]  As the population ages, this is an important systems-challenge; What might transportation look like if it was considered a vital public utility rather than assumed to be the purview of the private, autonomous realm?

The early 20th century saw the first accessible streetcars and buses in some major cities. By the mid-20th century, specialized transportation services, such as paratransit, were becoming more common for people with disabilities who could not use regular public transportation. In the US, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 established specific guidelines for accessible public transportation, including requirements for low-floor buses, kneeling buses, and accessible train platforms. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the widespread adoption of the accessible minivan and the growth of ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft, provided new options for private transportation. The development of accessible parking and increased enforcement of accessible parking laws has also helped to improve mobility for people with disabilities. In recent years, the use of technology, such as GPS and real-time transportation information, has made it easier for people with disabilities to plan and navigate their trips.

Canada’s Accessible Transportation for Persons with Disabilities regulations describe the legal mandates that are required to make all federally-regulated transportation, including air travel, interprovincial and international passenger rail, bus and ferry service, and security and border crossing accessible.^[4] In Calgary, Fair Calgary Community Voices is a community collaboration which advocated for the first low-income transit pass in Canada that can be used on paratransit as well as through fixed route service (i.e. public transit).^[5] Following a great deal of advocacy from many groups, including the Alberta Ability Network, the program is now funded by both municipally and provincially.  Encouragingly, the City of Calgary has also now adapted an equitable policy stating equitable access to all city services and city subsidized programs.^[6]  Financial equitable access to public transport continues to expand into more municipalites across Alberta to begin to address inter-regional travel within and between smaller cities.^[7]

Public accessible transportation has challenges in sprawling, under-resourced, Canadian cities, and may not be serving persons with disabilities well enough.  Nearly 800,000 Canadians with disabilities consider themselves housebound due to their condition.^[8]  One in six residents attribute this to a lack of specialized transportation, a barrier most frequently mentioned by those with loss of vision.^[9]   A recent treport byRadical Inclusion, a grassroots group supported through the John Humphreys Centre for Peace and Human Rights, outlines the significant challenges that people living with disabilities in Edmonton are experiencing, for example.^[10]

Calgary’s challenges in recent years have been in the spotlight. Calgary Transit Access, the City’s specialized public transportation solution for Calgarians with disabilities, is underinvested in, relative to other Canadian cities of comparable size, with often long circuitous, often tedious routes and inadequately trained drivers, making it an unreliable service for most persons living with a disability.^[11]  For example, an excellent end-of-year portrait of a person living with dyspraxia, a mobility-limiting motor disorder, and their revealing journey using Calgary transit, reveals a matrix of careful planning, patient waiting, and ubiquitous frustration and inconvenience that most Calgarians would have difficulty relating to.^[12]  The accessibility taxi system is in even more of a state of neglect; While Calgary used to have over 100 accessible taxis on-call, as part of its Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles (WAV) program, that number is now 52, in a city with a far larger population. For all practical purposes, taxi service is no longer accessible.^[13]

There are also emerging issues associated with new transportation technologies, such as the safety risk posed by quiet electric vehicles to people with vision loss (and EVs are often heavier, so potentially more damaging at the same speed).^[14]

On the positive side, Calgary’s approach to active transportation is more obviously inclusive.  The Calgary’s Pathway and Bikeway Network (5A) Program, updated in Fall, 2023, uses the core principle of Always Available for All Ages and Abilities.^[15] This implies building active transportation infrastructure for all to use year-round.