Councillor Brett Herron has committed to improving the city for the disabled, after taking up the Wheelchair Challenge of Whilma Liedeman to spend a morning in a wheelchair. The experience led him to make a firm commitment to make public transport and the streets of Cape Town more easily accessible for the disabled.
The event, attended by Whilma, several other wheelchair users and journalists, was the start of a process of getting feedback from various disability groups about how to optimise their access on public transport and their use of city streets. “Spending four hours in a wheelchair opened my eyes to what wheelchair users face daily. While I expected to be physically exhausted, the real challenge was the barriers in our way,” said Cllr Herron.
Transport for Cape Town (TCT), the City’s transport authority launched late last year, will set the standards for universal access – access for all groups, including the disabled, elderly people and children, those carrying large amounts of luggage and even women travelling alone at night. TCT will also ensure links between train, bus and other transport services are accessible, and oversee implementation.
“Crossing Strand Street was scary”, he said. There are ramps onto the pavement, but wheelchair users struggled to push themselves onto these ramps at the central island, and on the other side of the road.
At the Civic Centre station, Cllr Herron and his companions tested wheelchair access onto the MyCiTi buses. Some of them struggled to push their wheelchairs onto the boarding bridge that led to the bus, as there was a slight dip between the station platform and the bridge. “This will be improved,” said Cllr Herron. “We designed the MyCiTi service to be universally accessible, and will tweak it until it is user friendly. MyCiTi has been hailed internationally as a role-model on universal access – we have tactile paving for the blind, boarding bridges, audible pedestrian crossings, safety features including CCTV cameras – and yet we are still on a learning curve.”
The group visited the Cape Town railway station. There is wheelchair access through special broad turnstiles at the station, and the service is gradually being upgraded to provide universal access. “The problem of a gap between the platform and the train carriages remains, but disabled people can phone ahead to organise for Metrorail staff to help them board. The exciting news is that the new train sets, which will be universally accessible, are arriving in the first quarter of 2015,” he said.
Along the Khayelitsha and Mitchells Plain lines, 18 stations are to be revamped, and will be universally accessible.
“What happened today is part of a meaningful process, not just a once-off event, As a policymaker, I must state that universal access is something we must address urgently. It will be done incrementally – it cannot happen overnight – but it will happen. Either a facility is universally accessible, or it is not. There is no half-way mark, ” he said.
For more information about the MyCiTi service, log on to www.myciti.org.za or phone the Transport Information Centre on 0800 65 64 63.
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