Access

 My son is an ambulatory wheelchair user. He's about to start university, and today we travelled into central Manchester for his Disabled Students Allowance (DSA) assessment, to determine what equipment and support he needs to succeed while he's there. It was a refreshing change, after years of dealing with the DWP on behalf of two disabled children/young adults, to encounter an assessor who understood their brief and whose objective was to find the right tools and recommend them. All in all, quite a postive day.

Getting to the assessment centre, though, was another matter. I didn't want to drive into central Manchester (there are too many stealth bus lanes and closed-to-ordinary-traffic roads these days aimed at trapping the unwary occasional traveller to our fair city in its penalty traffic camera system) but we have an integrated public transport system and it's only three miles, so this shouldn't have been a problem.

We couldn't go by train because Levenshulme still has no disabled access (I've lived here nearly 40 years and it's been promised for pretty much all that time). If you look closely at this lovely print by my friend Paul Magrs, you'll see the problem. No matter that disabled people and parents with prams can't actually get from the street to the ticket office or platforms - as our councillor told us, we have a lovely new mural to enjoy to raise morale!

My son's not keen on buses which, while fairly plentiful, can be tricky to get on and off, even where the suspension can be dropped to street level (he could do a whole separate blog post about the trials of getting around by bus) and the audible disgruntlement of some of the travelling public make it a less than pleasurable experience.

His favoured mode of transport is the Metrolink system, which has good accessibility and which has a stop about 2-3 minutes walk/wheel from the assessment centre, so Plan A was drive the 3.5 miles to East Didsbury metrolink, park and get the tram into town. 

We got to East Didsbury to find NO parking spaces (Note to Offspring: apply for that Blue Badge before you go to uni) so we had to devise a Plan B, which was to drive all the way back past home and another 3 miles into the city centre to park near that light-sapping place that replaced the old BBC studios on Oxford Road (Circle Square). This was about a ten minute walk/wheel from the assessment centre, with a light uphill incline, but nothing like the hills in Leeds where he will be studying. 

Gentle reader, if you are not disabled you may never have noticed the appalling quality of dropped kerbs in the centre of this "world class city" - they either aren't dropped enough, or too much (so that puddles form in them) or the surrounding tarmac is so poorly maintained that any advantage to dropping a kerb is lost. My son is fit enough to do a mini-wheelie to get himself over the initial bump of a not-quite-dropped-enough kerb, but many wheelchair users could not. We can understand (if not be happy about) the paltry 10 functional dropped kerbs of the 38 he had to navigate other week while taking part in Levenshulme Pride - after all, it's "only the suburbs" and there's no money - but the Manchester is allegedly one of the country's major urban centres, one of the flattest cities in the country and we love it to bits, but really - this is the state of just one the kerbs that has been made 'accessible' (all of that cracked tactile paving was loose and unstable).

So why are they so bad? Does the council just chuck the contract at the cheapest bidder? Do they not do any inspections of the work to see if it's actually fit for pupose? Maybe it's just that until and unless you experience them as a wheelchair user, they probably look lovely.

We're both taking part in the Manchester Pride march this weekend, so will keep you posted on how we get on!