In Landmark Settlement, ACLU Wins New Guarantees For Mobility Impaired Bus Passengers in Los Angeles

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

LOS ANGELES — The ACLU of Southern California today announced a landmark settlement with county transit officials in a legal fight to guarantee access to city bus lines for passengers who use wheelchairs or other assistive devices.

According to an ACLU lawsuit filed in 1998, mobility impaired passengers were frequently left to wait by the side of the road because wheelchair lifts were not in working order, or because drivers simply did not stop to pick them up. Even when a bus stopped and the lift worked, restraints inside the buses were frequently not in working order, thus endangering passengers’ safety, the ACLU said.

“Disabled riders have not simply been sent to the back of the bus,” said ACLU staff attorney Dan Tokaji, “they have been kept off the bus entirely. This settlement will change that.”

Under the settlement agreement, the Metropolitan Transit Authority must guarantee that a minimum percentage of buses with wheelchair lifts and restraints in full working order will be rolled out each morning. Transit officials must also create an oversight system to be carried out by an independent company using testers to ascertain how frequently mobility impaired passengers are bypassed because of equipment or other problems.

“Concrete measures such as these are the bricks and mortar of history,” said Peter Eliasberg, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California. “The Americans with Disabilities Act was the blueprint for meaningful change, and this case and this agreement are an example of the realization of that vision of equal access for people with disabilities. Mobility-impaired people will no longer be left stranded on the streets of Los Angeles.”

Mobility impaired bus riders in the case told of being passed by again and again as they sought to go about the business of their daily lives in Los Angeles.

The ACLU sought and, in September 1998, received a court injunction to stop MTA’s discriminatory service patterns. The agreement, subject to the approval of the federal district court, will settle the portion of the lawsuit aimed at improving service to passengers in wheelchairs. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted yesterday to approve the agreement.

“Negotiations for this agreement were intense,” said Eliasberg. “We are optimistic that the judge will see this solution as a just one and approve it.”

Private attorneys David Warshaw, Danny Fisher, David Gross, and the late Stanley Fleishman joined the case as pro bono co-counsel.

The case, filed in 1998, is Beauchamp v., Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority.

For more information on the case, visit the ACLU of Southern California Web site at http://www.aclu-sc.org