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Comment by dustincoates | Hacker News Reader

Having children and, thus, a stroller, has given me some small level of insight into what it must be to try and navigate Paris in a wheelchair.

I can only think of one, maybe two, Metro stations that I can access with my youngest without carrying him. Many stores I would not be able to enter if I wasn't able to tip the wheels up. Curb cuts are routinely blocked by tourist scooters and anyway people often take up too much of the space on the sidewalk with their vehicles to get through. Add on to the fact that apartment stock must be 95% inaccessible if you're in a wheelchair.

It might be why I have only twice seen someone in a wheelchair in my seven years here. My wife and I have discussed before that, as much as we love it here, we'd move out right away if any of us had accessibility needs.

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I got this too. Another thing I notice is how common it is to block pavements with whatever - vehicles, bins, general street furniture, whatever.

Normally when I suggest a driver doesn't park on a pavement I get a grumpy dismissal, though I once suggested it to a DHL driver who immediately got my point and moved. That was refreshing.

The quality of the pavement matters a lot too.

I once pushed my daughter’s pram down a path and hit the front of the next slab, and stopped dead. I’d not done her up and she shot out and was caught by the mesh of the sun shade. Lesson learned, belt them in.

I’m fairly certain every parent does this at least once.

Hopefully only once.

Yes, I'm French too and when I was on holiday in Thailand, in a mall I noticed that there were people in wheelchairs shopping, my first thought: in France they wouldn't be able to be here because the accomodations are so bad..

It's not 100% true and it's improving but very, very slowly..

There's a technology issue too: my German in laws gave us a baby carriage that seemed to have been built for ascending the Eiger -- though it seemed (and was) huge it made navigating Paris quite easy (had to carry it up/down the metro steps) and even fit in the prehistoric elevator in our apartment building. Frankly, supposedly-snooty parisians are quite accommodating towards people with babies (once they can walk on their own though...)

But I never saw anything like that in the parisian baby shops.

I agree though about unattended obstacles on the trottoir -- it's as if people forget they need to use them themselves.

Being a swede that sounds surprising. Does France not have regulations for accessibility in public spaces?

Paris is ancient and built on a bunch of hills, there are quite a few places where retrofitting the city to make it more accessible would be easier by rebuilding the whole thing than by making changes and that's not going to happen. Amsterdam has an easier time of it, not quite as old, though old enough that that isn't a big factor in the difference, the good bit is that it is mostly flat (other than the canal bridges, some of which can be pretty steep). Even so there are areas of the inner city that would be hard to navigate in a wheelchair.

Stockholm wasn't exactly built last year either.

True, but like Amsterdam it is mostly flat, right?

Having lived in both Stockholm and Amsterdam, I can assure you that Stockholm is not at all flat like Amsterdam!

No idea about how easy either city is to get around with a wheelchair. Pushing a fully loaded double-stroller is no problem for an average-sized, ablebodied adult in any of them.

Hard to tell for me, after decades in Bergen my sense of what people consider hilly is skewed.

Just the name of this city is an indication

The RATP should be ashamed of themselves with the poor accessibility of the Paris metro. Barcelona's metro isn't that much older but is almost 100% accessible.

Wasn't Barcelona's metro mostly either new or newly rebuilt as of 1992? Spain may not have had an ADA equivalent at that point requiring great accessibility at that time, but that's still way different than all the century-old Paris metro lines.

That's a great alternative measure, especially those wide strollers!

A double-wide stroller really makes you aware of exactly how wide doors are, even ones with automatic openers.

The easy way to measure things - if you couldn't barely squeeze a Jeep into the space, you're going to have a hard time maneuvering a wheelchair or doublewide stroller.

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