The transport providers got a decade or so extra time to implement the Disability Discrimination Act, mainly to modify vehicles/rolling stock
However what this has meant is they don't do anything about disability. The staff training other public services have had to undertake doesn't happen. This is particularly apparent on the railways, where they still ask disabled people to give twenty-four hours notice, though some allow disabled travellers to ask for assistance before travel on the day.
This gives rise to an argument that if disabled people don't notify, anything that befalls them during travel is their fault. For example automatic barriers on stations - sometimes you cannot get the option to go through the manual barrier if you haven't asked in advance.
For people on the autistic spectrum transport can be confusing, noise, people moving around, conflicting platform and on-train announcements (especially the out of sequence ones - "this train is not in service" just as a train full of passengers pulls out of the station).
I'm on several transport bodies where I raise disability issues. When I raise the autism issue the response I get is nobody else raises this.
Is autism no longer an issue for travel? Or is this something NAS needs to look at? Do parents and carers or people with autism in these discussions have no trouble with transport any more?
