A luxury bus line in San Francisco has been accused of removing access for people with disabilities in favor of a coffee bar, according to a complaint filed by former city transit employee Chris Pangilinan, who has used a wheelchair for most of his life.
Pangilinan filed his complaint against Leap, a transportation startup, with the Justice Department, alleging that the company violated the Americans With Disabilities Act by operating publicly available vehicles without providing alternatives for people in wheelchairs. He also said he was looking at other companies that appeared not to comply with the law.
Leap said it would take steps to fix the problem. “As a short term solution, we are removing seats from one of our buses that still has a working ramp to make room for disabled commuters,” founder Kyle Kirchhoff said in a statement to The Guardian. “In the future, these considerations will be a high priority during our design process. We’re sorry to anyone we’ve offended and we hope to do a better job next time.”
The company website states that it does not provide wheelchair access. “Accessibility is something that is very important to us, but due to our size it is not something we are currently able to accommodate,” according to the company’s frequently asked questions page. “As we expand, we plan to build buses with wheelchair access.”
Pangilinan said that the removal of the wheelchair ramps appears to be needless. “If you look at the interiors of the bus, you can see where the wheelchair locations should be, but in its place are the leather seats and the bar, and where the ramp should be, it’s just a floor,” he said. “The ramp itself didn’t have to be removed for anything.”
“It appears that the vehicles used by Leap are not new,” wrote Pangilinan in his complaint to the DOJ, “but in the process of renovating them to their specifications, Leap removed features that made the buses previously wheelchair accessible, such as the front door ramp, and wheelchair securement areas within the vehicle.”
Pangilinan named two other companies he’d heard from friends did not provide wheelchair access, San Francisco-based Chariot and Boston service Bridj. By email, Chariot CEO Ali Vahabzadeh said the company was “currently working with our vehicle vendors to source handicap-accessible vehicles”.
Reached by phone, Bridj CEO Matt George said that his company did indeed provide wheelchair access and that he was shocked to see competitors refuse to do so.
“We’ve worked with a number of people who provide transaccess for folks who are in wheelchairs,” George said. “We don’t own or operate any of the buses we put on the road – we have in our vendor base wheelchair-accessible vehicles, with lifts and securement points.”
George said he found the the pictures of the Leap vehicles used in the several profiles of the popular service to be in poor taste. “They decided to modify a bus that was wheelchair accessible to a bus that wasn’t wheelchair accessible,” he said. “I can’t imagine that’s safe for anybody, actually. They have a servant there pouring mocha-cappa-latta-chinos or whatever, holding on for dear life.”
