Background
This study was made with a personal friend, whose identity I chose to preserve. He is a foreign national living in Estonia, like me, but he has been here for a few years and is an amputee who needs a wheelchair for mobility on a daily basis. He is an otherwise healthy man in his late 20s to mid 30s. He chooses to only move around by car and one day we decided to take a bus ride together so we could discuss the challenges of using public transport when you have a disability.
We chose to stack the deck in our favor and picked a non-busy weekend's day to move between two locations downtown. As he explained to me, Tallinn is a nice place mobility-wise for the disabled, as long as you only look to the streets and sidewalks. Most if not all street corners have dropped curbs that make climbing up and down with a wheelchair fairly easy. Buildings are another story completely, as most buildings have flights of stairs, raised steps or a combination of both to access the interior, including rather modern ones. He lives in a modern building complex that has no elevators whatsoever, and he has to climb up or down several flights of stairs, something he does using his wheelchair as a makeshift crutch in a rather ingenious way, moving it up a few steps and leaning on it to go to the next step, then repeating the procedure until he is up. The process of doing it for several flights of stairs is rather painful and takes an insurmountable amount of time, as I've witnessed.
Once we hit the streets he is quite ambulatory and his youthful strength keeps him moving as fast as everyone in the group. Some dropped curbs are easier to negotiate than others, but on average he has no trouble at all moving within the city. We reach the bus stop and check the timetable. I am completely unable to read Estonian, but he is capable of negotiating a few words of the language (an ability that would come useful soon enough, as we were about to learn). He tells me that the buses with wheelchair accessibility are marked by a blue line under the minutes on the timetable. Luckily for us, Tallinn buses come regularly and the next scheduled bus passing has a blue line under it, so we wait and lo and behold, a bus.
The Problem
The bus driver stopped and, as you can see in the picture above, the low floor on the bus was not enough to enable you to negotiate the distance between the curb and the bus without additional help. We had no idea how to access the bus and were about to give up and let the bus go when my friend rolled to the front door and asked the driver how to board using a wheelchair. The driver stops, opens his personal door, gets a pair of gloves, goes to the middle door of the bus and pulls a handle from the floor. There is a very well hidden, unsignalized ramp on the floor! I pushed him up the ramp, as it looks quite steep, but he said that, for the record, he could do it himself with some effort.
We took the bus for a few blocks, staying in the designated wheelchair space. It has a few seatbelt-like appendages that we assume are to keep the wheelchairs strapped in case of accident, but he jokingly explained that nobody else is wearing a seatbelt, so he does not feel it is a fair option to be the only one strapped to the bus. When we arrived at the destination, I (who cannot speak a word of Estonian) took it upon myself to pull the handle and unfold the ramp so he could climb down. We negotiated a few more dropped curbs on our way to a restaurant to discuss the experience we'd just had.
Discussion
He explained that riding his own car he retains a level of independence that he could not have with the public transport. Since the ramps are not automated and pushing the button inside the bus simply informs the driver that he has to come to the middle of the bus to unfold the ramp, we agree that it breaks the freedom of mobility expected from a true accessible experience, and the fact that we could not find a button to do the same thing from the outside makes us assume the only way to do it is to actually speak Estonian and bother the driver.
We drew the following capability levels scale comparing his actual abilities to the abilities needed to use the accessibility ramp. It is surprisingly difficult to do it, considering you need to communicate your need for it. It also made me feel quite helpless if I were in his place, because I would most certainly not be able to ask the driver to operate the ramp for me nor do it myself from a chair. It is disconcerting to see an accessibility feature that matches so much the actual abilities of the person who needs it that any slight difference might make or break the usability scale.
Conclusions
In further discussion, we reached together the conclusion that the fact that the ramp is not automated makes a lot of difference, but what really makes this option a kludge instead of a real solution is the terrible signalization and communication features. Not having a way to communicate, from the outside, that you need the accessibility ramp makes it borderline useless. It is the only high-demand point in the whole scale, and it needs addressing. I myself felt extremely unable to do the exact same thing if I were on a wheelchair and alone and although I'm a strong proponent of using public transport on a daily basis I could not find any fault in his decision to only move around by car.
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