by F-line to Dudley via Park
SbooX wrote:The inconvenience is irrelevant to the rest of the passengers when the law requires that the T provide assistance to handicapped passengers. They MUST assist. Frankly, doing lifts right on the vehicles would probably work a lot faster and more reliably than those manual lifts-on-wheels present in a lot of the stations. Too many operators won't even get out to work one of those manual lifts. I was on the inbound platform at Prudential last week when one woman in a wheelchair had to wait for THREE trains to go by before somebody would do their job, get out, and hoist her on to the lift that was sitting there on the platform. If that isn't against the law, I don't know what is. The T is used to using on-vehicle lifts with its bus fleet. Retrofitting trolleys with the same should provide for similar routine when the situation comes up...and will at least prevent embarassing ILLEGAL acts of negligence like happens too often when they leave people in wheelchairs stranded because they're too lazy to operate a frigging manual lift.MBTA1 wrote: Instead of low floors what about One wheel chair lift on each side of the train?Its irrelevant since it wouldn't fulfill ADA requirements. For ADA compliance wheelchairs need to be able to board without the use of lifts, hence the low floors everyone is using nowadays. Besides, it would likely take 2-3 minutes to load or unload one wheelchair. Can you say traffic jam?
How costly would it be to add two wheel chair lifts to the existing T7's?
Also, I think there are grandfathering issues at work that exempt the old lines from complete and total requirements of ADA compliance. For example, the T is under no obligation to upgrade the stops on the Brigham Circle-to-Heath St. street-running portion of the E line because the line has been in continuous use since before the laws were passed. Same goes for the other existing Green Line branches, and the High Speed Line. Because of that, Type 7's with wheelchair lifts would work if low-floor, non-lift infrastructure is prohibitive to implement (which it's proving to be). I just don't think you'd be able to run a full fleet of nothing but those cars on "new" construction (Arborway restoration, West Medford) and still remain in compliance.
But it's better than nothing, and probably wouldn't be that hard to do with the existing Type 7 fleet, or even the older cars on the High Speed Line (which will be waiting many, many years for its ADA compliance). They were able to tuck those lifts into the RTS busses with no problems. Even the T's solution of trainlining Type 7's with Type 8's to achieve full compliance isn't working out. The Breda's aren't running on 3 of the 4 lines because of performance issues, and they're doing a spotty job even on the B of mixing and matching cars. You're as likely to get either an all-Breda 2-car train or an all-Kinki 2-car train than you are to get a mixed set...and that's just not satisfactory ADA compliance.