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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Nope, the ADA requirement for transportation is that a company must provide "equivalent service."

https://www.transit.dot.gov/regulations-and-guidance/civil-r...

The relevant requirements are that the following must be equivalent for everyone regardless of disability.

(2) Response time (if the system is demand responsive);

(f) Reservations capability (if the system is demand responsive); (g) Any constraints on capacity or service availability; (h) Restrictions priorities based on trip purpose (if the system is demand responsive).

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It still leaves much to interpretation. A taxi company is subject to the same rules, but only a small portion of their fleet is accessible. If you call a wheel chair accessible taxi, response depends on where those taxis are and if they are available.

At any rate, the ADA is a popular topic to sue over (see California drive by ADA lawsuits, for example). You can do everything right but still expect a few lawsuits at least. A lawsuit itself doesn’t prove anything until judgement has happened.

The response time requirement could create an interesting tension between ADA proponents and environmental advocates. That is, if Uber/Lyft need to have vehicles that are 2 minutes away for passengers with motorized scooters/chairs whenever they have vehicles that are 2 minutes away for ambulatory passengers, this will require having many larger vehicles. These vehicles pollute more (and if they're EVs some day, they'll draw more electricity).

In my experience, only about 5% of the rides I've had end up being on vehicles large enough to stow a motorized chair, so equivalent response time could mean a major shift in the type of vehicles used.

ADA already forces decisions to be made contrary to environmental concerns. Added construction being a key one.

IMO, ADA is a great example of overbearing government regulation. It doesn't leave much room for "reasonable" accommodations and dictates solutions. (Case in point, my condo building can't use a portion of trash rooms as recycle storage, which gives large environmental benefits, because of wheelchair accessibility rules.. but why does this matter on floors where wheelchair bound residents don't live?)

The fact that people consider it 'added' rather than the bare minimum is partly why the ADA is prescriptive. Also, because it would be incredibly burdensome for someone with a disability to have to figure out how each building does their 'accommodations'.

> why does this matter on floors where wheelchair bound residents don't live?

Because residents aren't the only people who could be using that trash room. Because a resident could be injured while living there.

I think it's weird how the default experience is apparently to be exclusionary.

Right, I agree on the intention of ADA. But buildings should be allowed to make reasonable tweaks.

My building was built before recycles and computer became a huge thing. Trash room only has a trash shoot. To dispose compost, I need to take an elevator 30 floors down to dispose compost, which takes a lot of time.

If the building could allocate a third of trash rooms to store recycles, rotate them if a resident became disabled, we'd be in a situation where able bodied people are better off and disabled people are no worse off. Instead ADA is too restrictive, so we're in a suboptimal spot

Many people with disabilities who actually rely on protections afforded under the ADA would disagree with you. The ADA actually requires employers and other public places to make reasonable accommodations: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...

Regarding your condo building: separate is never equal. Requiring people with disabilities to only live on certain floors is discriminatory. Disability is perhaps the only minority that anyone can enter into at any time, through no action of their own. You can't say that you don't need to worry about accessibility of floors where there are no wheelchair users, because you can't predict who could need one in the future, when or why they will need one.

It is perfectly acceptable for an apartment building to have accessible and non accessible units. The ADA isn’t that crazy, which is why wheel chair bars are probably not in your bathroom.

I'm not disagreeing with you there, the term "accessible" has a wide range. But it would be inappropriate for a building to have some units with e.g. steps and some without. I'm not sure what you been by wheelchair bars, but if you mean handle bars my building accommodates those through a reasonable accommodation request although I have lived in buildings before which had them in every unit.

It would be completely appropriate, and in fact that’s what happens. We had to turn down a nice one bedroom in a new downtown Bellevue building because it was a split level with a walk down (and we have a toddler so....). Most of the units were not like that, and this one was cheaper as a result.

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