Victorian woman Kathryn Beaton says repeated, illegal denials of service from drivers refusing to allow her guide dog into their vehicles have left her effectively housebound.
Edited to add: “anxious and in tears” is some shit tier headline writing when the real problem is the loss of independence and freedom, and the hours she has had to spend waiting just to be actively discriminated against.
Nobody pays any mind to air quality and it’s made my life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.
Anyway, i feel for her, but i think the service animal stuff is way over simplified and people forget that other people with disabilities also pay a cost.
This is true. Those that do not actually require a service animal for actual valid reasons like this trash it for those who do.
same way stores can deny service to individuals.
That really depends on the reasons. Denying service for a discriminatory reason (like a disability) will generally breach discrimination laws.
It sounds like they don’t have a problem with the disability, but with the tool she chooses to use to circumvent the disability.
In the USA this would be illegal. You can’t deny a person with a disability that is accommodated by a service dog unless the dog is not obeying the handler or pees/poops inside. Doesn’t matter if someone has allergies, a phobia, or is religious. There are fines but it takes a very long time to get anywhere.
Not true. Service animals can be denied if they pose an immediate threat to human health or safety. An allergy could certainly be a threat to health, and a driver having an allergic reaction is definitely a threat to safety.
Also, the federal law only applies to public accommodations, I don’t think “ride-shares” would count as that. An Uber driver doesn’t stop and pick up the first person they see, they have a private agreement with a specific person.
Doesn’t matter if someone has allergies
That sounds like bullshit, how can that not be a factor? How would, for example, a fear of dogs not be a factor?
I can absolutely understand having medically recognized allergies be an acceptable reason to refuse the service.
A fear of dogs doesn’t cut it for me. A fear of black people doesn’t mean you get to refuse service to them. A person has a right to have their service dog with them.
It probably shouldn’t include allergies…depending on how bad those are sneezing while at the wheel would be very dangerous…
Obviously it should be confirmed by a doctor…but still that sounds dangerous.
So as a taxi driver with asthma and horrific allergies, I’ve found dog owners are not typically terribly understanding when I tell them we’re going to have another cab come pick them up. I’ve had several people insist that their animal is a service dog as if this somehow changes my own health condition.
I’ve often found that my own access to public spaces is limited by the use of service animals and straight up pets in public places. I don’t even try to go to breweries anymore. I wouldn’t bother trying to get on a plane. Even hotels are basically a no go for me unless i want to get sick more often than not.
I don’t pretend to have a solution to this, but access to public spaces for animals and for some allergy sufferers is mutually exclusive. It makes it a lot more complicated than ‘service animals should be everywhere’ or ‘allergy sufferers should have access to public spaces’. The two are kind of in conflict. It sucks.
Nobody pays any mind to air quality and it’s made my life a whole lot more difficult than it needs to be.
Anyway, i feel for her, but i think the service animal stuff is way over simplified and people forget that other people with disabilities also pay a cost.
The fact that this blind lady needs to have both her guide dog and a taxi/rideshare to get around anywhere sucks for both her and the driver - the former for obvious reasons, and the latter for the reasons you listed out. It’s a sort-of perfect microcosm of the major issue a lot of modern cities seem to have: poor public transit and heavy car-centric infrastructure.
The unfortunate reality that she absolutely needs a car to seemingly get anywhere is the problem here. People - and not just people with disabilities, but in general - should have (and deserve) different viable options to get around. The whole idea of a person becoming stuck at their house because of not being able to get the transport they need to get around the place is fuckin atrocious and should be what’s actually talked about here, not “jUsT lEt ThE aNiMaL oN!” or “MaKe An UbEr ApP fOr PeOpLe LiKe ThIs!”
You hit a nerve. I’m not blind, but my crazy glaucoma prevents me from safely operating a vehicle, so I voluntarily gave up driving years ago.
I live outside a village with no buses, taxis, trains, or ride shares, so when I go to my quarterly opthamologist visit, I have to arrange for someone to take me on the 4 hours round trip drive. (There’s no closer office.) I had to cancel tomorrow’s appointment when my arrangement fell through. I’m housebound and it’s fucking madness.
Just to add to the controversy, in a perfect world with good public transportation, how do you still accommodate both? On a train you could have an animal-free car but what about buses? You can’t have a separate bus for every single accommodation.
So the thing to understand is that while well designed cities have good public transit, what they actually have better is walkability. You should be able to do most of your business without taking any transit options. This saves the disabled woman from needing to use transit and helps reduce the amount of service animals in transit.
There still needs to be some degree of mixing but there’s limitations as to how protected we can make things for everyone. Some people have an airborne allergy to peanuts but we aren’t going to ban peanuts everywhere to accommodate. People with severe animal allergies will have up continue finding ways to cope since we aren’t going to ban people from having pets. The best we can do is what’s reasonable.
Where I live busses are often marked in the timetable as to whether they are wheelchair accessible. So there’s precedent already for mixed accomodation transport and informing customers in advance, it might be possible to extend that system further.
in a perfect world with good public transportation, how do you still accommodate both
A) You have excellent public transport suitable for service animals, wheelchairs, blind people, etc
B) People who can’t take it for whatever reason travel by car. If you can get one (you won’t get one for asthma…) a disability parking permit is a huge help. They’re recognised globally and make it a lot easier to park in metropolitan areas. Those permits are valid whether you’re driving or a passenger. With one of those permits even car-hostile places like the Netherlands become practical.
I have severe allergies and on public transport I wear N95 mask. It effectively filters out everything that might be a problem for me, and as a bonus have avoided getting sick even when everyone around me seems to be catching things. If everyone did this we could eliminate airborne viruses and many other conditions, but I’m not holding out hope for that.
Well, if we properly defined ‘dog allergy’ as a disability, maybe the accessibility tool that we could use to accommodate it might be like… a gas mask or something like that?
It’d be strange at first, but eventually we’d treat them no differently than a cane or wheelchair.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean that every single taxi needs to be the taxi that picks up dogs.
I feel like the general approach taken by society when it comes to air quality, from strangers to my own family, is that air quality doesn’t really matter, and that no accommodations should ever be made to improve it.
Which is part of the reason I don’t really leave the house unless I have to. We’re both stuck at home, but the situations look a lot different, and in my case people almost never see the result.
Why would you deny disable people a ride? I think just by accepting them, they’ll give you a big tip just for accepting the ride. In any case it’s still feels good to help people out, and make money at the same time, potentially a good tip if you be nice. Guide dogs are well trained so it doesn’t even affect your car that much. It doesn’t make sense to deny the ride, even just from a money-driven perspective, since the most vulnerable people are often the most kind people.
A few reasons. Firstly disabled people aren’t going to frequently tip in Australia, spending money to get everywhere is very expensive already. That’s before all the other costs that come with being disabled. Plus anti-tip culture is still a big thing in Australia.
Secondly, a significant amount of drivers don’t want mess, some of them are just anti-dogs for cultural or religious reasons, some people have phobias or allergies… some people have just heard too many horror stories about self-declared “emotional support animals”.
It’s a huge problem, and this sort of thing happens a lot, in different ways for different disabilities.
I think there should be an option in rideshares to register a service animal. Drivers should not be able to see it when the ride gets offered, but only when they are about like 1 block from the rider, then it show up as: “The rider have disabilities that requires the use of a service animal. Please be reminded that denying a ride due to a rider’s disability or due to unwillingness to accommodate the service animal is illegal under [Insert Country Name] law. Thank you for your cooperation!”
I’ve personally witnessed 2 taxi drivers in a 10 minute time span who were hailed on the side of the street begin to pull over to collect a passenger, but stop as soon as they see the guide dog and drive off saying “sorry, no dogs”. If they can deny someone to their face, they will deny them 1 block away.
I’d like to see the companies allow people with evidence of disability affected by dogs to opt out in advance from being assigned pickup jobs for people with service animals.
If you read the article, it’s due to service animals. People are refusing people with animals because they think that service animals will shit and piss in their car, likely.
That and I think this is cherry picking data. What’s the data for anyone with a pet? How can someone even tell if someone’s blind? I don’t think it’s about being blind, it’s about the pet, she just can’t see the person drive up, see a dog, and drive off.
Real service animals are well trained enough to not misbehave or damage property.
Unfortunately many people who don’t have trained service animals claim they do.
In the US at least you are allowed to ask what task the dog is trained to perform (but not what illness/disability the person has), and can have the dog removed if it is out of control or not housebroken, but service cannot be denied due to allergies.
Doesn’t uber have a pet friendly option when booking
Drivers may choose to stop receiving Uber Pet trips requests at any time, but are still required by law to accept riders with assistance animals (e.g. guide dogs) – assistance animals are legally allowed to go everywhere their owner goes. - Uber AU Pets policy
Riders with service animals are not required to use Uber Pet. Per Uber’s US Service Animal Policy (see below), driver partners have a legal obligation to provide service to riders with service animals, regardless of ride type. Uber US Pets policy
Uber Pets also charges a premium, which would still be discrimination in these cases. This is likely why people with assistance animals are not required to select it.
