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Handicapped Parking

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From georgiana, Featured Contributor
Posted on September 26, 2008

In defense of those spots you desperately wish you could park in

Handicapped parking is a volatile subject. Plenty of people have the "must be nice syndrome," i.e. it must be nice to be able to never have to worry about parking or it must be nice to not have to walk very far when you go out. Real But is it nice? Probably not, given that in almost all cases it comes along with a life-impacting physical handicap.

A large part of the animosity comes from a perception that some people who use the handicapped spaces don't really need them. This perception has been reinforced in popular culture and daily life. For instance, Penn and Teller did an episode of their cable show that focused on the ADA and what the episode guide calls "the widely abused nonsense that is "handicap parking," adding fuel to an already ferocious fire. One of Carl Hiaasen's novels features a character who uses, or abuses, a counterfeit handicapped tag. All of this contributes to the general impression that the whole concept is an annoying scam, designed to make everyone's parking more difficult, which leads to unpleasant interactions. Here are just a few samples of what I've personally seen.

• A woman yelling at another woman for not parking in the handicapped spot. Woman A said she had to walk farther because woman B, whose car had handicapped plates, parked next to the handicapped space, instead of in it.
• A car parked in the striped portion between two handicapped spots, which meant the passenger, who was in a motorized wheelchair, had to disembark into the street, then drive in the street until he came to one of the curb cuts a couple of blocks away.
• Someone wrote to a nationally syndicated advice columnist to complain because they have a friend with a handicapped tag and don't believe the friend really needs it. This one struck me as especially strange as everyone has good days and bad days. Maybe they don't need the closer spot today but they will next week.
• Several people haranguing a driver because she didn't have anything visibly wrong with her yet had handicapped tags. This is quite shocking to me. Don't any of these people watch 'House'? There are only about a million diseases that will leave you too sick to get around yet leave you looking perfectly normal. Heck, you could have had a heart attack and need temporary tags and look fit as a fiddle.

So maybe there are people out there using the handicapped spots when they shouldn't. I don't think being mean to the people who do need them is helping anything. Maybe if we want to complain we could complain about the biggest problem I see with handicapped parking, namely there isn't enough of it at the one place you need it the most; the hospital.

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georgiana is a featured contributor for vLane.