Ian G Batten wrote:

In article , The Only
Living Boy in New Cross wrote:
Well exactly. Of course it's unrealistic *now*, but in the USA disabled
people have been able to sue over access since the mid-1970s, and as a
result there is far more awareness and accessibility over there. LU
must have known that things were going the same way here;

Indeed, a friend of my parents who is in a chair had a Churchill
Fellowship to the US in the seventies to look at this issue. Of course,
it's a social shift that has a lot of relationship to guilt over Vietnam
and improvements in battlefield medicine: there was a sudden rise in the
number of wheelchair using young men who were otherwise fit, politicised
and politically significant. How much of the wheelchair access to, say,
BART is practical if you don't have the upper body strength of a fit young
man who is the victim of an injury (as oppposed, say, to progressive
wasting from MS) is an interesting issue. Wheelchair users are not, by
and large, the wheelchair users one sees doing the London Marathon, but
have multiple other issues.

To be honest it raises the whole issue of whether such people should be
using the tube at all. Let's face it, even with lifts and ramps a wheelchair
is the last thing needed on a busy tube platform or train even outside of
rush hour.
Given that there is plenty of access to other transport options, I think
some sense of balance is needed. For example, would subsidising taxis for
these people be more cost effective than digging lift shafts and altering
the layout in Victorian underground structures? Almost certainly.
What will suing the tube actually achieve? Some cash for the folks in
wheelchairs but less money available to actually do the work they are
demanding. Crazy.
It has to be accepted that the Tube was never designed for disabled people
and that altering it would be prohibitively expensive for little real gain.
I know that's a very harsh view, but that's life. If you end up in a
wheelchair, yes it's very tragic but you can't go around expecting the rest
of the world to change so that you can live exactly the same life you did
before.

IMHO