Parking Mobility

Interesting article from the Baraboo News Republic on disabled parking challenges and the community response:

Pull into the parking space, get out of the car and walk inside the store.

Sounds easy. Right?

For someone with a disability – especially one that requires a wheelchair to be loaded and unloaded from a vehicle – it’s no simple task.

And when those who don’t park in handicap stalls aren’t mindful of those who do, the task becomes even more difficult.

“What we’re finding is that people are being extremely lazy,” said Steve Pribbenow, director of the Sauk County Disabled Parking Enforcement Assistance Council.

The council consists of seven members from throughout Sauk County who are trained and empowered by state law to enforce the proper use of handicap stalls, plates and identification cards. Members can compel businesses to comply with the law, as well.

Pribbenow said abuse of disabled parking rules is not simply limited to vehicles parking in disabled parking spaces without a pass.

One of the most frequent problems is that vehicles encroach on a handicap space or the striped area next to one, he said. Those access aisles are a “no man’s land” used by vehicles with ramps to load and unload wheelchairs.

Too often, people with disabilities are forced to squeeze themselves in and out of their vehicles because other cars have parked too close, Pribbenow said.

“These people are of the age where if they break a hip, they aren’t going to live much longer,” he said.

While people without a disability can squirm in and out of a vehicle if others are parked too close, that’s not always possible for a person with a disability.

“A driver using a mobility aid whose vehicle allows her to get in and out through the use of a side lift or ramp needs the entire width of an access aisle, along with the van-accessible stall, simply to gain access to a building,” Sauk County Mobility Manager Ashley Nedeau-Owen said.

He said he notices disabled parking violations every day, even in the parking lot outside his office at the county’s West Square Building in Baraboo. And he’s concerned about the general public’s lack of knowledge about handicap parking rules.

Although Nedeau-Owen regularly sees Baraboo Police Department officers writing warnings and citations, he said many violations go unenforced.

Some people use the “I’ll be back in a minute” excuse to temporarily park in a handicap space while they load or unload cargo from their vehicles, Nedeau-Owen said.

Baraboo Police Department Lt. Rob Sinden said it’s important for the public to understand how valuable the marked spaces are to the daily lives of people with disabilities.

While the most frequent handicap parking citation written by police officers is for vehicles that park in marked stalls without a pass, Sinden said officers also have noticed a number of disabled parking permits improperly displayed.

“(State law) mandates the permit be hung from the rear view mirror unless one is not available,” Sinden said. “All too often we see authorized disabled persons placing them on a sun visor or somewhere else far too difficult for an officer to see.”

Common handicap parking violations• Encroachment on access aisles (striped lines) next to handicap spaces

• Use of a disabled parking pass by someone who is not disabled

• Improper display of a handicap parking pass

• Unloading a disabled person near a building and then unnecessarily parking in a handicap stall, even with a proper tag

• Blocking access to a handicap stall

• Using an access aisle to park a motorcycle

• Temporarily using handicap stall or access aisle to load or unload cargo

Interesting article By Kathryn Marchocki in the New Hampshire Union Leader :

Before proposing any changes aimed at curbing abuse, the head of the state agency that issues handicapped parking plates and placards said he wants to meet with the disabled community to gauge the extent of fraudulent use of parking privileges.

Manchester municipal parking enforcers and members of the Governor’s Commission on Disability have pointed to New Hampshire’s practice of issuing up to two placards or a placard and a license plate to one person, saying it increases the potential for abuse.

According to 2010 figures, New Hampshire issued a total 73.9 placards and plates per 1,000 residents. That compares to 49.7 issued per 1,000 residents of Massachusetts, which restricts qualified drivers to one placard or plate.

“If we can define the problem and that it’s significant enough that would warrant changing the rules, we would certainly have to discuss this with the Legislature. If we can come up with an improvement that … law enforcement could enforce easier … we certainly would want to look at that,” Division of Motor Vehicles Director Richard C. Bailey Jr. said in a recent interview.

“My big fear is I don’t want to implement a solution that is worse than the problem,” he added.

Bailey will hold his first joint parking committee meeting with the Governor’s Commission on Disability on March 16. The quarterly meetings are a forum for the disabled community to air their views, report concerns, and develop policy regarding handicapped parking.

The right balance

Bailey, who became director 11 months ago, said it’s crucial to strike the right balance between imposing restrictions to guard against abuse without making it too difficult for those who legitimately need the plates and placards to access them.

“The statute and the practice has been an attempt to be user-friendly to those who truly need the placards or plates and I think that allows for some potential for abuses,” Bailey said in a telephone interview last week.

The practice of issuing up to two handicapped placards or plate and placard is intended as a convenience for those with more than one vehicle.

“I see no reason why a person would need more than one,” said William H. Godfrey of Merrimack, who has multiple sclerosis and sits on the parking committee.

Many offenders use placards issued to a disabled relative — both living and deceased — to access free and convenient parking at handicapped-only spaces. Offenders also steal, forge, alter or counterfeit placards, Manchester municipal parking enforcers have said.

Godfrey said he would like state law changed so those who steal or alter handicapped placards would face criminal charges.”To me, it’s like counterfeiting or altering a state document. It’s just like possession of stolen property is an offense,” explained Godfrey, a member of the government relations committee of the Greater New England chapter of the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Open to abuse?

Out-of-state residents also cannot be denied New Hampshire handicapped parking privileges under state law, Godfrey said.

Former Motor Vehicles Division director Virginia C. Beecher brought the matter to the parking committee’s attention last year after a Massachusetts resident applied for and was issued a placard, Godfrey said.

“She looked at that as a loophole in the law,” Godfrey said. It has yet to be addressed, he added.

Currently, the only bill before state lawmakers regarding handicapped parking privileges is House Bill 134, which would exempt those over 70 years old from having to resubmit proof of eligibility every five years in order to renew their plate or placards. Currently, only veterans certified as permanently and totally disabled as a result of a service-related disability are exempt from this requirement.

Bailey said the bill, now before the Transportation Committee, could create a situation for potential abuse.

“We’re concerned about the open-endedness of anything like that,” Bailey said.

“If grandma got (a handicapped placard) when she was 70 and uses it for 10 years and passes away, but if the issuance is a permanent thing and never expires, that would be a situation open to abuse,” the director explained.

Saw in TechCrunch that San Fransisco has signalled support for a very cool iPhone application: Fire Department:

The application itself is called Fire Department. Download it, and you’ll be asked if you’re trained in CPR. Click ‘Yes’, and the application will then passively monitor your location (without draining your phone’s battery). Here’s where the life-saving comes in: if someone calls 911 to report a possible heart attack victim, 911 dispatchers can send an alert to anyone in the vicinity with CPR training who has this app on their phone. They’ll immediately receive a push notification with the location of the victim, as well as the locations of any nearby automatic external defibrillators (AEDs). The whole process only takes a matter of seconds. Minutes are absolutely critical in these situations, and the immediate initiation of CPR before an ambulance arrives can be life saving.

This is very cool as it relies on citizens providing and supplementing services traditionally offered by cities themselves.  Parking Mobility runs into this sort of thing with cities from time to time with questions like “but don’t the police do that?”

The reality is the police (or any city service)  can not be everywhere at all times.  Enabling citizen involvement through mobile technology improves the delivery of city services for everyone.

Joseph Tobianski | The Flint JournalJames McGarry of Davison sits in his Mazda RX8

FLINT, Michigan — Jamie McGarry did what he thought was right when he confronted a man who illegally parked in a handicapped spot at Hurley Health and Fitness.

The gym says McGarry went too far though and revoked the 31-year-old Davison man’s membership.

“Pretty simply, I just feel that it was flat out wrong,” said McGarry, who has used a wheelchair since age 20 after being paralyzed during surgery. “It’s a wrong that needs to be righted. I simply can’t let it go. It’s more than just how it affects me. I was just sticking up for the rights of the entire disabled community.”

McGarry had just finished his workout at the facility on Feb. 25 and was pulling out of his parking spot when he saw the car — without a handicap sticker — pull into the handicap spot next to him.

According to McGarry, he told the 20-something man he wasn’t allowed to park there but the man brushed off the concern, saying he’d only be there a couple minutes.

After a bit more “discussion” and after hearing a few four-letter words, McGarry decided to take matters into his own hands.

He backed his car out of his spot and parked it behind the man’s car, trapping the vehicle in the handicapped spot. Then, McGarry got in his wheelchair, left his vehicle and called security.

Both McGarry and the other driver argued they were in the right to security and McGarry said he ended up leaving in frustration.

He later was notified his membership to Hurley Health and Fitness had been revoked because of the dispute.

Hurley Medical Center spokeswoman Ilene Cantor released a statement on the incident, which said McGarry’s actions were not justified.

I read an article on Techcrunch on the weekend titled Why Women Rule The Internet.  The general gist was that the explosion we have seen in successful Web 2.0 enterprises have been driven primarily by women using them:

Consider some more data. Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web. Comscore says women are the majority of users of social networking sites and spend 30% more time on these sites than men; mobile social network usage is 55% female according to Nielsen.

In e-commerce, female purchasing power is also pretty clear.  Sites like Zappos (>$1 billion in revenue last year), Groupon ($760m last year), Gilt Groupe ($500m projected revenue this year), Etsy (over $300m in GMV last year), and Diapers ($300m estimated revenue last year) are all driven by a majority of female customers.  According to Gilt Groupe, women are 70% of the customer base and they drive 74% of revenue.  And 77% of Groupon’s customers are female according to their site.

Given this dominance in female users, I wondered how many of Parking Mobility’s users were women.  I know a lot of our users are women because of emails and support calls (yikes), but we don’t ask for demographic information from our users.

What do you think?  Is Parking Mobility biased to one gender?  We often get the comment that it’s a “vigilante” application.  Maybe it’s more of an empowerment application.