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.
Start fining uber the company a substantial amount for each offense and see how quickly their tone changes.
OP is in Australia. Never mind fines, this offence attracts a prison sentence and CEOs are sentenced to prison (rarely).
It’s rare because most CEOs aren’t stupid enough to risk breaking the law. The drivers are to blame. Trying to pin responsibility on someone else is a waste of time.
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.
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.
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.
Weird there aren’t medical exceptions to said law about providing those services…
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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
