Solutions To Disabled Parking Placard Usage

The 100-foot walk from a parked car to a building entrance is nothing for most people, but it is a slow slog for someone gripping a walker or crutches and shuffling forward a few inches at a time. The trip is not especially fun in a wheelchair, either. Drivers with mobility impairments aren’t looking for sympathy, but they want reasonable access and they don’t like being cheated out of it; hence their ire when finding parking spaces reserved for people with disabilities occupied. The odds are good that at least some of those spots are being illegally used by drivers who don’t need them. The value of a parking placard shouldn’t be that it is free,” says Carla Johnson, CBO, CASp, director, Mayor’s Office on Disability, San Francisco. Besides upsetting those being cheated, such behavior by the able-bodied offends cultural norms about fairness. The typical human response to a suspected cheater—at least in most democratic societies—is a quick, heartfelt rebuke: “Hey, that’s not right.

You can’t do that! And while feeling cheated is bad enough, a driver with ambulatory limitations can feel downright violated when he or she is targeted by placard thieves. Moreover, how we define and communicate about placard problems requires clarity and sensitivity, notes Ken Husting, PE, senior transportation engineer in the Parking Meters Division at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. There’s a distinction between misuse and abuse,” he says. The current laws for disability placards have the right intention but the wrong outcome; they actually make it harder for people with disabilities to find accessible parking when and where they need it,” Johnson says. Placard-usage difficulties—and solutions being explored and implemented—vary from city to city and state to state. To adapt the late Tip O’Neill’s famous saying about politics: All parking is local. The National Conference of State Legislatures reports that states have experimented with a variety of measures to deal with outright scofflaws.

Photo ID placards (Massachusetts, New Mexico, and South Carolina). More-detailed verification statements from physicians (Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, and Washington). Placards with more prominent expiration dates (New Jersey and Washington). Tougher penalties (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, and New Jersey). Databases of disabled permit holders provided to police by motor vehicle departments.Disabilities-oriented community service for second-time offenders (Washington). In North Carolina, City of Raleigh Parking Administrator Gordon Dash, CAPP, found that placard abuse and misuse was mainly a convenience issue in the city because handicapped parking on the streets was free. Many people who simply wanted to park close to work commonly used placards to snag disabled-designated spots, leaving their vehicles there all day. When I came in 2007 this was going on quite a bit,” says Dash. There were no meters downtown at the time. When we put them in I started getting calls from merchants saying, ‘We have handicapped parkers parking here, so how are we going to solve that problem if they can sit there all day with impunity?

The solution: Charge for on-street disabled parking but allow disabled parkers to pay for as many hours as they needed. It was a strategy that took time, television news reporters chasing after placard abusers, a business community willing to drive the issue forward with the city council, and political finesse to achieve. State law here says handicapped parking shall be unlimited,” says Dash. Dash says the change eliminated almost all the abuse, except for those employees working at the state capitol. We’ve had no problems since 2010,” Dash says. We saw all the immediate results in the first couple of months. We’re looking at a world of possibilities to see what makes the most sense,” says Ken Husting, PE, senior transportation engineer in the parking meters division at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Unfortunately, the most meaningful changes that will likely come out of the working group will need to be adopted at the state level,” Husting explains.