Chucking millions down the Tube

16 September 2009

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Transport for London is to waste £97 million on a ‘symbolic’ project to give wheelchair users access to Green Park station, says Andrew Gilligan. Why hasn’t Boris reined it in?

Any of these door-to-door options would also, of course, be a thousand times more useful to a disabled Londoner than having to struggle across kerbs and pavements to the closest accessible tube stop. For even TfL’s largesse has limits; it proposes to adapt no more than a quarter of its stations for wheelchairs, meaning that the vast majority of journeys disabled people might wish to make, even in those parts of London served by the tube, will still be impossible.

At the same time, the part of TfL which disabled Londoners actually can and do use — the door-to-door Dial-a-Ride service — gets far less money than it needs and is, as a result, often pitifully bad. At a recent meeting of the London Assembly’s transport committee, users told of being unable to book journeys over six miles, of being taken places but not brought back, of being refused permission to travel with their own wives, of being kept waiting on the pavement for three hours in a street filled with drunks and drug addicts. Val Shawcross, the committee’s deputy chair, said TfL was ‘in denial’ about the ‘very serious problem’ with the operation.

I asked Richard Parry, the acting head of the Underground, why he was wasting so much of his customers’ money. ‘Disabled Londoners want to use the tube like anybody else,’ he said. But do they? (And indeed, does anybody else?) The tube is merely a way of getting to other places, not a destination in itself. The disabled Londoners I know rightly mind if they cannot enter an art gallery, an office or a shop. They don’t care in the slightest how they get there.

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Vettekulla

September 23rd, 2009 3:51pm Report this comment

I always find disabled access facilities, particularly kerb-side ramps so thoughtfully provided throughout London, immensely helpful for the international traveler's ubiquitous suitcase-on-wheels. The only draw-back is having to share these ramps occasionally with anti-social cyclists. To make the Tube wheelie friendly will be a godsend. No more heaving that 23 kilo suitcase up and down steps. We owe a great debt to the disabled whom one rarely sees enjoying the benefits of these large investments.

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