Not Built For Me: Freedom, frustration in navigating public transport with a disability

Thursday, 17 March 2022

Abigail Knight is a 26-year-old who has Down syndrome. She shares her experience of using public transport and getting around Auckland.

Disabled people navigate a world that is often not built to suit their needs. In part four of this six-part series, Josephine Franks talks to Aucklanders about what works and what doesn’t on the city’s public transport network.

Public transport gives Abigail Knight the freedom to do what she loves most.

From her home in Auckland's Remuera she heads to restaurants in the CBD, to Newmarket for shopping and bowling, to work in Mount Eden, to her boyfriend’s house in Kaukapakapa, and to karaoke where her favourite song is I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.

Abigail Knight, 26, has Down syndrome. While Auckland’s buses and trains let her navigate the city largely independently, fragmented routes, changes to services and hard-to-read timetables create challenges.

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“It can be quite difficult at times,” she says.

Together, Abigail Knight and her mother Karen Knight will do practice runs of new bus routes.

“I do remember a few times where I ended up in the wrong spot, but I got there in the end.”

She is quite confident once she’s familiar with a route, but getting to that point can take a while.

When bus stops close or routes change, it can make journeys difficult for Abigail Knight.

Her mother Karen Knight will help her do practice runs of new journeys, driving behind to make sure she arrives safely.

“It seems typical of what parents have to do just to get that familiarity,” Karen Knight says.

For some trips Abigail Knight makes, there’s no easy way to get there by bus, so she has to take a taxi.

Mt Eden train station closing in 2020 made getting around “quite tricky”, Abigail Knight says, and every time a route changes it means going back to scratch.

“We did have a bus that used to go directly from my work to home and that was really easy … then they closed it down,” she says.

On occasion, Abigail Knight would discover halfway through her journey that a bus stop had moved. She’s not confident using the Auckland Transport app, so she would have to rely on asking people for directions. “That was quite challenging,” her mother says.

Having routes that weave through backstreets rather than taking main roads can be confusing. There used to be a basic route to get from home into the city but “they canned that”, Karen Knight says.

Sometimes there’s just no way of getting somewhere by public transport. Abigail Knight does dance classes in Grey Lynn. It’s 15 minutes in a car, but there’s no easy way to get there by bus. That means she has to get a taxi. However, the Total Mobility scheme, which subsidises transport for people with long-term impairments, means she gets her taxi trips at half price.

She has long-distance vision problems that can’t be corrected with glasses. That means she sometimes can’t see the number on the front of the bus until it’s too late.

With long gaps between buses, missing one can mean a long wait for the next.

She also finds it hard to understand timetables when rather than listing the time for each bus, the signs say they go at so many minutes past the hour.

Bus drivers are supposed to stop when they see someone with a guide dog or white cane – but that doesn’t always happen.

She says having announcements for each stop on buses would make her life easier.

That’s something that’s in the works for Auckland, thanks to advocacy from the disabled community.

Chris Orr, Blind Low Vision NZ's access and awareness advisor, says accessibility in Auckland has come a long way since he lost his vision in 1974.

Catching the train used to be a “horrible experience”, he says, but now you’ll find a number of accessibility features, including auto-deploying ramps, tactical ground surface indicators along platforms to direct people using canes, and blue and yellow colour schemes to help people with low vision distinguish the locations of doors and rails.

Staff on the networks have also been trained to work with people with different impairments, Orr said, so the “built environment is working with the human side of things”.

The shared space of Fort St was designed in collaboration with the blind community and is “fantastic”, Chris Orr says.

It’s when those two things are disconnected that accessibility falters, he says. For example, bus drivers are supposed to stop if they see someone waiting with a vision dog or white cane, but “that doesn’t always happen”.

“It’s the human intervention that’s the trick,” he says.

Natalie Polley, a spokeswoman for Auckland Transport (AT), says the council-controlled organisation is looking at a driver training programme, to make sure staff fully understand what they need to do to help people with accessibility needs.

Chris Orr says accessibility is achievable when disabled communities are consulted at the design phase.

Audio announcements are being rolled out across Auckland buses – eastern Auckland routes were the first to get them, but the whole fleet should be equipped in a year, she said.

It’s the same with visiting buildings. Even modern buildings with automatic doors and level access can become inaccessible when you get inside, Orr says, particularly where there’s a board displaying where different offices are, and no reception.

“You might know they’re in that building, but where? How do you get to those levels? Are there stairs, where are they, is there a lift and how do you find it?

“The building might be OK, but it’s the associated infrastructure that’s got to work as well.”

That infrastructure includes signs, doors, lifts, handrails you can grip, and a tactical ground surface to indicate where the stairs start, he says.

Getting it right requires collaborative consultation with the disabled community, Orr says, pointing to the shared spaces in Auckland’s Elliott St, Derby St and Fort St as examples of that happening well.

These types of streets, shared by pedestrians, cars and bikes, can tend to have one surface – but “for us as blind folk it meant taking away the things we need to keep in a straight line without straying into where cars go, because there’s no gutter”.

The shared space was developed by Auckland Council and the blind community. Together they came up with the “best standard and design in the world”, Orr says. The design was adopted by the World Blind Union, the global organisation for blind people, as the gold standard.

Instead of a curb, the design incorporates a tactile delineator a couple of metres out from the building line, which can be detected by a cane or felt under your feet. Outside that is what’s called the “activity zone”, for restaurant tables, planters and benches, and in the middle a lane for traffic.

It’s “fantastic”, Orr says. There’s space for wheelchairs, prams and people using canes without the chance they’ll get tangled in a cafe table, and the design is attractive, practical and safe.

“You work together in collaboration, you can make something very, very good,” Orr says – but it has to be thought about at the design phase.

Polo Aguirre from Idea Services, a support programme for adults with intellectual disabilities, says there has been great progress over the past decade for disabled people navigating Auckland, “but we’re still not there”.

Just last week, Auckland Transport was criticised in a coroner’s report for failing to make any changes to a crossing where a wheelchair user died in 2018.

William Wiki Teoi, 84, was not able to use an inaccessible pedestrian crossing and died when he was struck trying to navigate four lanes of traffic, a death the coroner called “preventable”.

Four years on, the crossing has still not been fixed.

Aguirre says there are access disparities across the city. Access to trains, for example, is still a “luxury” that not all disabled people have.

He says it would also be good to see more lifts in public places and the transformation of toilet facilities to make them more accessible.