What blocking disabled parking spots means

Here’s a story I was told about the effect of blocking disabled spots. This is a long post by necessity – I apologise in advance (for the length and any formatting errors) but it has to be long to reflect the impact that " sure it’s only 2 minutes" can have on disabled people and the people who care for them. I’ve spent a significant amount of my professional life working with disabled people and this is a story a single parent (lets call her Jenny) of two children with disabilities told at a training event I attended early in my career which has always stayed with me. Some details have been changed to protect hers and her children’s identity.

Jenny lives rurally. Jenny has two children (lets call them Aidan and Claire) with physical disabilities, they’re both wheelchair users. Aidan is her older child and also has a profound intellectual disability. This is what a trip to the shops looks like for Jenny’s family. She does all the same things to get ready to go to the shops that you do. She gets dressed, grabs her handbag, her phone etc. She does this while Aidan & Claire are still asleep. Then Jenny wakes Aidan. She raises the height of his adjustable bed, rolls him to one side to remove his nightclothes and change him. Then Jenny rolls him side to side again to dress him, and then another rolling manoeuvre to place a sling under him. Jenny moves in a hoist (example of what a hoist and sling look like here), then she moves in Aidan’s wheelchair and uses the hoist to transfer him out into his chair where she puts on his splints and shoes. Then she brings him to the living room which is awkward and difficult because of the size and layout of her house and the size of the chair. There she puts on Peppa Pig to keep him entertained. Then she does all this again with Claire but Claire is younger, lighter and more mobile and is able to do a bit more for herself. But Jenny is frequently obliged to leave Claire to check on Aidan who gets distressed easily.

Jenny then hopes it isn’t raining, goes out to the car and lowers its wheelchair ramp. Then she puts out a foldable ramp on the front step and manoeuvres Aidan in his large and heavy power chair down this ramp and then onto and up the car ramp where she secures it in place using built in hooks and straps before raising the car ramp back up again. Aidan is extremely distressed by this entire process and often hits and scratches Jenny. She then puts on Peppa Pig music to try and keep him calm and goes to get Claire. This time she is bringing a lighter wheelchair down the ramp and instead lifts Claire from her wheelchair into the car. It is not an easy lift, she is risking injury to them both by doing it and she definitely cannot do it forever because Claire is getting bigger and heavier as she gets older but this is the car they have right now. She then removes the wheels and footplates from Claire’s wheelchair, collapses it down and stows it in the car. From the point when both children are dressed it takes Jenny about 45 minutes to get them both into the car.

Now they get where they were planning to go (e.g. their nearest supermarket is a 30 minute drive). When they are out and about Claire moves around in her wheelchair independently and Jenny moves Aidan in his power chair. But there’s no disabled parking when they get to their destination, there are only two disabled spots and a BMW has parked across them both. Jenny can’t park in a non-disabled spot because she can’t lift Claire out without the door being open fully. She can’t put Claire in her wheelchair because she can’t fit the wheelchair up alongside the car and she isn’t able to carry Claire any further than the brief lift from car to chair. Jenny can’t just take Aidan out because she can’t get the ramp down at the back of the car because the parking spot isn’t deep enough and she’d have to do a 10-15 minute procedure while blocking traffic around her while Aidan is in distress. And then Claire would be left in the car alone anyway. She can’t park far away in a spot with no cars around it because she can’t guarantee someone won’t park next to them while they’re inside. Plus it’s hard for Claire to get her wheelchair across a car park with lumps and bumps and drains and slopes.

Jenny can’t leave the children unattended to go find the BMW driver because Aidan could become very distressed and is sitting right next to Claire who he may injure if left alone unsupervised, even if she was prepared for potential conflict with the owner of the BMW. She can’t wait for the driver to come back because Aidan is getting increasingly distressed and she has no way of knowing if they will be in there for two minutes or two hours. So instead of going to the pharmacy or getting groceries Jenny turns around, drives 30 minutes back home and repeats the leaving the house process in reverse and that’s 2.5 hours of their day gone for nothing, on top of all the physical labour Jenny puts into the process and the distress it causes her children. Aidan is exhausted and agitated, Claire is frustrated, humiliated and disappointed. Jenny is tired and angry and sad for her children.

tl:dr – Your 2 minute nip into the shop can have an incredible impact on a disabled person – please do not block disable spots. My answer to every justification and rationalisation and "what if" or "why doesn’t she" reply you’re thinking of posting to this is "Stop being a selfish cunt and just walk the extra 15m, you need the exercise anyway."