The house was on a main street and a green CTA bus passed by several times a day. I graduated from college in 1978 and I was living with my mother and sister in the house in which I was raised. To give people today some context on that situation, I ask people to imagine that the entire CTA system is suddenly and indefinitely shut down! How would that impact their lives? How would they get around? How isolated, abandoned and angry would they feel? It was as if the CTA system didn’t even exist. You can imagine how frustrating that was for anyone who didn’t have the physical ability to board CTA buses.
But without any federal mandate like that, there wasn’t a single accessible bus in the street fleet of the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). The ADA requires that all public transit buses put into service must be wheelchair accessible. I say to myself, “What the hell is this? I thought those inaccessible buses were long gone!”Īnd then I wake up and realize it was just a bad dream.īut that’s how things were in Chicago prior to 1990, when the Americans with Disabilities Act was signed into law. So in my nightmare, I’m mad as a hornet when I see the green bus go by. They’re painted white, red and blue and inside the front door is a ramp that flips out onto the curb when the driver flips a switch so a wheelchair user can roll right in. The public transit buses in Chicago are much different today. Every once in a while, I have what I call a “green-bus nightmare”: I’m out and about and all of a sudden, a public transit bus goes by and it’s painted green and there are three big steps inside the front door - so it’s inaccessible as hell for someone who uses a wheelchair, like me.