WHBU ? (Wheelchair vs. Buggy)

[DisabilityIsALifestyleChoice]

(NC'd but old hand here)

DH tends to chat in various discussion groups, and yesterday, in a discussion about roads told someone to fuck off.

Here's the conversation which started around using buses and how everyone should do it to relieve road congestion,

DH:
And wheelchair users can wait all day, and still not get a bus if there are people refusing to move their baby buggies.

POSTER:
What are parents to do if they have a child in a buggy, some shopping
underneath, so it cannot be folded and cannot relinquish their position and get a later bus, because they have to be at school for a particular time to pick up their 5 year-old child?

DH:
That's choice, compared to the necessity to use a wheelchair.

POSTER:
It's not choice if you have to do the shopping so as to have an evening meal, have a young child that you have to bring with you and need to pick up the other child from school. The wheelchair user may well have much more choice, as many can walk short distances and chairs
can fold. In some cases, their journey may be purely frivolous, unlike the example parent.

It was at this point DH suggested the poster "Go f* themselves".

I should add that obviously DH is sensitive to wheelchair users (which is what I am) and tries to be polite where he can (as befits his age, and maturity). But he's fretting now whether he was too abrupt .

I wonder what the vipers of AIBU think ? (For the record, I am 100% on his side, here ...)

It's not always a choice. I've got a newborn, a 20 month old in a double buggy,a 3 year old with walking difficulties, plus an 8 year old. So I wouldn't be happy if we all had to get off. How else are we meant to get to where we need to?
Is your 3 year old in a Maclaren Major?

It's not always a choice. I've got a newborn, a 20 month old in a double buggy,a 3 year old with walking difficulties, plus an 8 year old. So I wouldn't be happy if we all had to get off. How else are we meant to get to where we need to?

Do you have the option of learning to drive/using a car?

I would never get on a bus if I was in a wheelchair. There are people who have no other choices. Trust me.

The problem is it is pushed as wheelchair user vs buggy pusher. It Isn't about bus companies providing adequate travel for everyone. It isn't about the face that bus companies won't do anything without alto of pressure hence how long it took to get decent accessible buses from disability campaigners.
Instead of people agreeing it is shit having to get off even though its the right thing to do, those people are told they are terrible people and should get off into the cold and rain happily. Well I'm not happy if I'm stuck at a bus stop in the cold and rain if the bus is full and I'd just me on foot or if its the third one to go past full of buggies or with wheelchair users on or if I need to get off to make space for a wheelchair user. But I'm frustrated at the crappy bus service and tube situation and the situation. That doesn't make me a bad person, it makes me cold and wet and worried toddler will get a cold.

Campaigning for buggy spaces will never work. Most of us use them for too brief a time, and there is too much "don't use a bus", "leave 2 hours early", "collapse it and carry the triplets", "in my day..." because parenthood is a choice and therefore people don't think concessions should be made for something you brought upon yourself

So I will always move/wait but my being grumpy about it is ONLY ever directed at a person if you've stowed your empty pushchair in the wheelchair space then buggered off upstairs oblovious

I would never get on a bus if I was in a wheelchair. Trust me.

There must be a name for people who think like this. It's a type of delusion for sure.

Who are you trying to convince, OP? Yourself?

Sorry for typos. Broken screen

MinervaSaidThar

People who experience discrimination daily are still human. Sure, it's more effective to catch flies with honey than vinegar. You're right. In fact, I deeply approve of the concept of polite and reasoned discussion in general.

But. Wheelchair-users don't get issued with vouchers for professional training as public relations consultants, along with their first wheelchair. Do they? Or pay commensurate with their performance educating the masses. But from the way these threads go, you'd think they did!

It is common, to expect people deeply affected by an issue to speak and debate as if they have no emotional investment in it. If they fail, it invalidates their argument. I deeply disagree with that. It's not fair and it works out as just another mechanism to silence and marginalise minorities.

Sleeping, I don't think anyone is demanding that buggy users get off "happily". They can be as grumpy as they like, so long as they vacate the space.

I would never get on a bus if I was in a wheelchair. Trust me.

Are you the person who asked my sister why she was in a wheelchair. And following a brief explanation, including the fact that my sister was a very new wheelchair user, then proceed to tell her that you could never be in a wheelchair, and that you'd rather be dead than use one? Because you sound pretty much as ignorant as that person.

I used the bus all the time when my children were small, we always folded as there weren't buggy spaces (they didn't take wheelchairs either).

We bought umbrella folding pushchairs for this purpose and it wasn't difficult.
You could even get side by side twin pushchairs like this.

People helped you on and off.

I'm not ancient, my two have just turned 20.

Wheelchairs always should have priority.

'I would never get on a bus if I was in a wheelchair. '

How would you get to appointments? Go out at all? Do you have a driver in your employ? Enough money to hire mobility taxis whenever? Are you one of those people who still believes disabled people get money thrown at them and a 'free car' that suits their needs and should just use that rather than inconveniencing entitled pram huns?

Ceto my point was re people who say they'd get off but be unhappy being slated. As long as you aren't angry at the wheelchair user, grumpy seems like a perfectly acceptable response for being made to vacate a bus when no one else has to. By the letter of the law, pushchair and buggy users are the lowest of the low. No one would ever ask people sitting down to vacate so their chairs could be flipped up to make way for a buggy if it couldn't be collapsed for any reaosn

No one would ever ask people sitting down to vacate so their chairs could be flipped up to make way for a buggy if it couldn't be collapsed for any reaosn

In an age where we have iPhone 7532z, I feel that mankind has the ingenuity to design buses with a greater ratio of flip-up seats, in order to accommodate more than one wheelchair-user if necessary.

And yet, it's not happening.

Actually Gilead I know for a fact we get discipled for kicking prams off in favour of wheelchairs, you can’t kick one person of in favour for another... it has happened several times to colleagues.

You can’t kick someone off the bus who has paid there fare when they have done nothing wrong.

We do ask firmly but sometimes people really do just flat out refuse!

@crazycatgal I don’t work for them, those are photos I found on google.

TaraCarter especially as however wccomodating drivers are at times (some do let on a third buggy, wait forgone to be collapsed etc) they cab only take 1 wheelchair and that must be bloody annoying if two wheelchair users want to use public transport together. I imagine trains arwnt much better. Trams have a decent ratio of wheelchair spaces but a buggy on a tram is something I only do out of absolute necessity as its a pita

We do ask firmly but sometimes people really do just flat out refuse!
I think the auggwstion from your earlier posts was you don't even ask, you just drive in my (perhaps you are my bus driver!)

Suggestion

@SophantToSuckYourBlooodMumsnet

You know it takes more than someone whining "disablist" for it to be so, right?

I used the bus a lot when my youngest was a baby. But I did so on the understanding that taking an unfolded buggy onto the bus was a privilege not a right. So I wouldn't ever have put myself in the hypothetical situation suggested in the OP. If I got on the bus it was on the understanding that I might have to pick up my child and fold the buggy at any moment because somebody who actually needed it might require the wheelchair space.

Your husband was completely right and the woman on the other forum was being ridiculous - sadly I feel he lost the moral high ground when he swore at her though.

Hmm yeah nada. Of course you’re not disablist. That’s why you were deleted.

Wtf is "virtue signalling" anyway?

I think it's one of those made-up mumsnet things, useful when you want to continue to have a massive go at someone even tho they're quite nice and reasonable.

My dads been in a wheelchair 7 years and he has never got on the bus. Here you get discounts on black cabs if your disabled. So he pays very little to use them and he uses his dla to pay. Not hard really is it.

Misspolly, how hard is it to work out that the black cab scheme isn't available for everyone? And indeed that there is no guarantee that it will be around for ever?

Still sure that if you are ever in a wheelchair you will stay at home and miss all your appointments rather than travel by bus?

nada

Do you need a light down there in that hole?

You've gone from implying it's wheelchair-users' fault for not being polite enough to... explicitly stating that they're a big part of the problem. Bleddy hell.

So it's not our inadequate transport infrastructure, or our society's attitudes towards disability or widespread ignorance of the impact of disability upon someone's life that are the big factors here then.

Some times, the passengers with wheelchairs aren't apologetic enough when they get on the bus. That's the key issue.

Glad we got that sorted out.