WIBU to have not vacated my seat and stood on a crowded bus to make way for a buggy?

[Janey50]

I got on the bus at 2.30pm today. It was packed. I am disabled,use one or sometimes 2 walking sticks (I have rheumatoid and osteoarthritis in multiple joints and fibromyalgia) so my heart sank. Luckily a kind lady offered me her seat. Unfortunately,this seat was right next to the wheelchair/pushchair space, on one of these badly designed buses, whereby if you sit in one of these seats,your legs are in the way of a second buggy getting on. There was already one buggy there,a large double one. Another (single) buggy boarded at the next stop. The mother looked at me and said 'Can you move'. I said 'Where to? There are no empty seats down here'. She huffed and rolled her eyes and said 'Go upstairs then'. Just then the man sitting behind me piped up 'Excus me,the lady's disabled,why should she have to go upstairs?' I then said to the woman with the buggy 'Sorry but I can't stand up on a moving bus'. I have balance problems and weak wrists and fingers and find it almost impossible to hold onto a pole on a moving bus. She said mo more but continued to give me daggers glances and tutting and huffing every time someone had to squeeze past her buggy stuck out in the aisle (which tbh I'm surprised the driver allowed). The woman with the buggy made me feel like IWBU. Was I?

YNBU. My DM was recently on a bus where a lady with a shopping trolley even had the nerve to ask a bloke on two crutches to move! Incidentally, he'd also chose to sit on one of the fold down seats as the bus was packed.

Kudos to the man who stood up for you though. My DM said no one did on her bus being disabled herself I think she was scared to .
I asked my bus company their policy on this and they said that the drivers can't say anything to them and they rely on the goodwill of the passengers to have common sense basically. But as we all know too well OP. Common sense ain't all that common. Hope you're home with a cuppa now.

Arent there stickers on those seats for disabled people, yanbu and she was being a twat

Arent there stickers on those seats for disabled people

On our buses the stickers say these seats are for the elderly, disabled and those with young children.

motherofdragons - I was just about to tell her that I was disabled,but the man behind me chipped in before I had the chance! I don't expect people to automatically realise that I have a disability,but I thought the fact that I was clutching 2 walking sticks in front of me,in clear view was quite a big clue! The area where I live seems to have more than it's fair share of over-entitled,mouthy buggy users. Barely a week goes by without me witnessing a slanging match on a bus between a buggy user and a wheelchair user,or a buggy user and the bus driver. Heaven forbid that they might have to fold down their buggy,or wait a maximum of 10 minutes for the next bus.

I always try my best to get one of the priority seats at the front of the bus,but on this occasion they were all taken,2 by what I could see were disabled/elderly passengers but the other 2,I don't know. I don't make assumptions because I know that not all disabilities are visible,but it is not at all unusual for me to get on a packed bus and have no one in the priority seats offer me one. I won't ask,but my DD will, and I can almost guarantee that an able-bodied young man will be shamed into jumping up and offering me the seat.

It's the reason I avoided buses when dc were little. Dd1 once ended up with a nose bleed after I folded buggy and we had to stand. Driver did an emergency stop. She'd have been safer in her buggy as I could have held it easier imo. When I had dtds I had a 3 yo plus floppy prem twins and was asked to fold my buggy. How do you do that? (It was a single as dtd1 was in the sling as I knew the double buggy wouldn't work). Wearing a sling with one baby, trying to pick up tiny 4lb newborn then fold a buggy while watching a toddler all why the bus is moving is beyond my abilities. Most buggies have baby stuff in the bottom so folding isn't always easy and if you rarely use buses your pushchair is unlikely to be ideal for buses. I just hate it when people assume buggy folding is easy. Honestly very little is easy when you've not slept.
Overall she should have been polite after but no harm in her asking.

Surely a lot of these things depend on circumstances - my bus used to be one an hour and walking rather than gettiog a bus for a journey of four stops would have meant walking over a mountain.

Not that I ever took DS on a bus in his pushchair, but in an ideal world we would all be considerate of each other. On a packed bus with no free seats it might not be safe to stand and hold a small baby/child, especially if the bus is going to go barrelling down a steep hill.

I have dyspraxia and can't always figure out how to operate even familiar objects. I can't balance on moving buses/trains and it took me years (and a specially modified car) to learn how to drive. But because I'm not physically disabled I'd be expected to stand (usually just about manage this by pushing my way through the crowd to lean on something). I'd definitely not be able to collapse a buggy no matter how simple it was.