The Washington Post’s Lena Sun has an article in today’s issue regarding the mess that is MetroAccess’ certification process:
Nadia Ibrahim, a policy adviser for the Labor Department, gets to work from her Rockville home by taking MetroAccess, a paratransit service operated by Metro. Ibrahim, who has cerebral palsy, uses a wheelchair and a service dog.
Her disability is permanent.
But every three years, she must go through a time-consuming process that will cost Metro more than $1 million this year to prove a basic fact of life for her and thousands of other riders: Her disability makes it difficult for her to ride Metrorail or Metrobus and therefore qualifies her for curb-to-curb MetroAccess service.
“I find it sort of insane that you take MetroAccess to get recertified to show that you need MetroAccess,” said Ibrahim, 37. “It’s a process that doesn’t make logical sense.”
Metro officials said the process is necessary because eligibility for the federally mandated shared-ride service depends on a person’s physical ability. People do not automatically qualify because they have a permanent disability.
One of the issues that was being sidelined by the furore over MV Transit’s taking over of the service two years ago was the recertification process itself. At the time, WMATA seemed to be tightening up the eligibility criteria, making it much more difficult for people to qualify for MetroAccess service.
We believed at the time (and still do to some degree), that the changes to the certification criteria was intended more towards reducing the number of eligible riders in an attempt to reduce costs by reducing number of trips made, more than anything else.
So we’re glad that the entire certification process may finally be looked at in more depth.
The question is: Who will be looking at it?
“We are considering broader changes to the application and eligibility assessment process for the coming year, but they will require a substantial amount of public discussion, planning and, in some cases, board approval before they will be implemented,” said Christian Kent, Metro’s chief of disability services, which include MetroAccess.
This would be the WMATA Board, presumably.
Which does not, as far as we’re aware, include a single person with disabilities.
I doubt very much that one single board member regularly uses MetroAccess, or has to go through certification.
Even though we have “one of our own” at the helm of MetroAccess, and Christian Kent has shown himself to be a conscientious advocate of disability transportation in the DC Metro area, they are not the “final decision makers” when this issue comes up for changing - the changes will be made solely on the say-so of a bunch of able bodied “managers”, in effect. The most we, the disabled community, will be able to do in the process is “advise”.
This is totally unacceptable. A bunch of people, none of whom uses or depends on the service, are once more going to be put in the position of being able to judge our needs from a position of ignorance.
No-one is likely to say that the eligibility process is not in need of review and changing - but the disabled community needs to stay on top of this and put pressure on WMATA at all levels to ensure that this doesn’t turn into yet another cynical ploy to reduce eligibility to reduce costs.
As long as the final arbiters (the Board) of any profound changes remains an elitist group, with no members who actually use the service, our practical needs risk being sacrificed to try to save money at our expense so able-bodied MetroRail and MetroBus riders can have new floors, cell phones that work in tunnels, flickering video ads on walls, or LED signs outside stations.
When MV Transit took over the contract, WMATA tried to marginalize us and dismiss our concerns over the reduction in practical service as somehow being “perks”. We must now stand together and pointedly, publicly, and loudly at the beginning of public awareness growing, tell WMATA’s Board “Nothing about us, without us”.
We should demand to know if the costs WMATA hopes to make to reduce MetroAccess costs will then be diverted to providing “perks” for that majority ridership.
We need to ensure that our voices are effectively prominent in the decision making process to come regarding eligibility, to protect those riders who otherwise will be disenfranchised in the name of “cost cutting”, savings that most likely will be spent on the “majority” ridership’s “perks”.
We need to reposition the argument, and ask them - how many disabled riders do they consider “acceptable” to disenfranchise through changes to eligibility, in order to divert the savings to those stupid cosmetic goodies planned that benefit only the majority able-bodied ridership.
Legitimate changes to optimize the system benefits everyone, including the community itself.
Changes made that enhance the ability of able-bodied riders to better annoy the hell out of each other talking loudly on their cell phones, whilst disenfranchising and further marginalizing members of the disabled community benefits no-one.
We must force the board and WMATA in general to prove its commitment, not only legal but moral, to providing effective comparable transit to people who legitimately need it in the DC Metro area - and expose them if prejudice penalizes us to give perks to the rest.
Categories: In The Media , MetroAccess | Tags: Lena Sun, MetroAccess, Recertification, WMATA | By: .
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