I mean, it's great that the "what about emergency vehicle access?" hack is so effective when pointing out the deficiencies of proposals for walkable communities, but it kind of burns my ass that you need to take that approach in the first place. I don't know how many conversations about communities planning I've seen that go like this:
Walkable communities advocate: Here's a plan for a walkable community in which only public transit will be permitted – no personal vehicles of any kind will be allowed.
Disability advocate: What about access for physically disabled people? If your options are public transit or the sidewalk and literally nothing else, any disabled person whose needs aren't fully served 100% of the time by your favoured public transit framework is fucked, and there's no such thing as a perfect public transit framework.
Walkable communities advocate, whose brain shut down the moment they heard the word "disabled" and didn't process anything past that point: Oh, you silly cripple, the term "walkable community" doesn't mean you're only allowed to walk! How quaint.
I guess pointing out "well, if only public transit is accommodated, how are firefighters and paramedics supposed to access emergencies?" works because now they can imagine themselves being affected!
@amtrak-official I was trying to find a non-shrill way to interact with the conversation last week when y'all were designing the ideal city, and, yeah.
- Public transportation was easier before llcovid. Now, since few people mask, it's a game of Russian roulette for us. a c
- Accessibility services are patchy at best. In June, I took a cross-country rail trip, including commuter, hitting Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Boston, Worcester, and Nzfy bc ç. I hit more broken elevators, stairs, long walks, rough surfaces, ableist systems like "stand here for 20 minutes to wait for a mobility cart," difficult to see/hear announcrnnhn hhh and occasionally ableist staff than I've encountered in years. I don't blame workers; I try to stay good-humored about it since I know they're understaffed, overworked, underpaid, and undertrained. But I couldn't deal with this all the time without losing my cool. 
- And this was with the disability tax: I pay for first class, to save myself hassle.
- Weather. Weather. Weather
This is going to be wordy because I am bad at keeping things short.
I don’t think you seem rude or anything like that. I should have made clear that I don’t think we should ban cars out right, they are important for accessibility and in cases like covid, personal safety. The point of the exercise was to design one street, I feel like most streets would still allow cars. It was to show how our streets could be designed differently in one way. I also do feel like we need to design our transit systems to be more accessible with things like equal level boarding, ramps, working evaluators, wheelchair storage locations and spaces for them on transit, visible signage, braille and other disabilities aids.
