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Comment by orangepurple | Hacker News Reader

Try to get around the Montreal subway on a wheelchair or pushing a stroller. You can't. There are multiple flights of stairs to get anywhere. Accessibility has not yet been discovered there. There are no old people on the Montreal subway for some reason?

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Accesibility is certainly not where it needs to be for our metro, and elevators at every station is long overdue.

That said, the STM _has_ been installing elevators, and currently 25 stations have elevators, which is a lot more than even a few years ago [0]. Five additional stations are under construction [1].

[0] https://www.stm.info/en/elevatoraccess

[1] https://www.stm.info/en/about/major_projects/major-metro-pro...

There are elevators. They are being retro-fitted and sometines it's not simple at all to add them but they exist.

> They are located in 25 metro stations.

https://www.stm.info/en/elevatoraccess

That's a good start but if you're old or with multiple young children it requires careful planning. I drive into the city with my family rather than trying to remember exactly which stations I won't be trapped in.

If you’re old or have young kids life already requires careful planning.

No reason to avoid adding to the scope and complexity of that planning, then?

That sounds stressful. Just an FYI for your next trip, every metro map has a little symbol indicating whether a station has an elevator.

Babybjörn or similar carrier and a backpack for accoutrements is imo often superior to a stroller once your young one can sit up.

I agree but if you have 3 under 5 one of them is bound to get tired and spontaneously turn to jello

FWIW retrofitting is difficult in Berlin too, so they make a point of indicating which stations (fewer than half) are accessible.

I wonder if it is cheaper to buy every disabled person an Uber pass than refit large subway systems to make them accessible.

That doesn't solve things for strollers... (Hint: you also need a car seat in the car for the baby.)

See above, 95% of parents could use an on-body carrier. Baby in the carrier and older kids walk, they'll drag your speed down a bit but you'd probably not stroller for hours on end.

Plus you don't need that huge SUV to fit that stroller and awkwardly park it in the entrance of restaurants and so on.

My wife and I always marvel at how much shit other parents carry. I don’t get it at all. Why make things harder than they need to be?

We rarely used a stroller except when our kids were quite young and we were gonna do a lot of walking. Like at the zoo or something. Then, we’d use a cheap little light stroller, not one of those giant monster cargo ones most people have. On-body carriers were better in other cases. And when they could walk, we made them walk, frequently, to get them used to it, carrying less and less over time.

If I went out solo with a young kid, I usually could fit everything I needed for 3-4 hours away in my pockets, easily. We had the usual giant diaper bag with the first kid but rarely used it, and I think we got rid of it before having more kids and didn’t replace it. There was just no need.

IDK what all these parents are carrying around in their cargo-strollers and 20 gallon diaper bags. Kids can travel really light if you’re only gonna be out during the day.

I live in a central city without a car. Our stroller was used for carrying groceries and getting our daughter to/from daycare in a reasonable amount of time. But our sole focus deciding on the stroller was good storage for grocery runs and otherwise compact enough to use on dense city sidewalks or lug down the subway. I too scratched my head when suburbanites brought out their huge strollers from their huge cars/SUVs and essentially lounged at their destinations.

Big stroller as grocery-bag-holder for the walk home does make sense. Yeah, that’s a good example of when they’re not a bad call.

> I too scratched my head when suburbanites brought out their huge strollers from their huge cars/SUVs and essentially lounged at their destinations.

Yeah those are the biggest head-scratchers for sure. People at the friggin’ grocery store or park, which they drove to, with what seems to be several pounds of kid-supplies in huge strollers and bags. Like… you can go back to the car. You probably won’t need to, but if you do, it’s right there. Leave most of that in the car. You don’t need to carry 20 diapers or whatever in the store. One or two will do.

I mean people can do whatever they want, of course, it just seemed like such a weird choice to us. Carrying so much stuff you almost certainly won’t need, so much that you need big, dedicated equipment for it. Seems like hard mode for no reason.

It doesn't need to solve everything for everyone if it succeeds in reducing road congestion by being accessible by 95% of the population.

Also strollers are much easier with elevators, but they're not impossible to use with escalators and even can be reasonably lifted for stairs. We've done it plenty. Of course the stroller should be city-sized, not suburban-sized.

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