Life is a journey, not a destination

The Braze team discovered a whole new meaning to the saying “Life is a journey, not a destination” on an outing to demo our anti-collision technology. For the trip back, decided to take the TTC to avoid the expense of taking a wheelchair cab (more on that later). What was supposed to take 36 minutes (according to Google maps) turned into a transit nightmare that dragged on for more than two hours!!

It started out as a fine day, but as rain started falling we quickly shed our coats to protect our chair’s exposed electronics. Things went downhill from there…

As the four of us got to the closest subway station, we looked around for a second entrance that did not involve going up a flight of stairs. We had some hope of finding one across the street, since an overhead tunnel seemed to lead to a parking structure with an elevator. False hope! As opposed to what we were told, this station wasn’t – and had never been – accessible.

We immediately turned to our phones to find alternative routes. This turned out to be tricky, since Google maps kept telling us to take the subway where we were, since it didn’t consider our accessibility predicament.  Thankfully, a kind policeman realized we were struggling and told us which buses to take to reach an accessible TTC subway station.

When the first bus came, Pooja had the honour of driving the chair into the bus and parking into the spot reserved for wheelchairs, not without bumping into different parts of the bus. Unfamiliar as we were with the anchoring system, we didn’t figure out right away how to pull the retractable hooks out (especially since the first one we tried turned out to be broken). The sign with paragraph upon paragraph of instructions (see picture below) was of no help at all! The worst part was that the driver pulled away from the curb without even checking that the chair was anchored down – it wasn’t. Getting off the bus was just as eventful as getting on since the space immediately in front of the platform was blocked by a mailbox.

Two buses and a good 45 minutes later, we arrived at the subway station only to find out that the only elevator was broken down. This time, a genuinely apologetic TTC employee offered us an alternate route to another accessible station and even called ahead to check that those elevators were working.

We finally reached an accessible station after taking three different buses – Pooja’s skills at getting on/off the bus had already improved! At this station, we noticed a few more accessibility gaps, like the lack of signage near the elevator, which led us to the wrong side of the platform, as if we hadn’t wasted enough time already.

A full 2 hours and 15 minutes after our departure, four times Google’s estimated trip duration, we finally arrived back at the office with our patience tested and a banged up prototype. It became apparent, even before the end of the trip, that this experience was about much more than just making it back to the office. It became one small piece of my journey to be more aware of the accessibility challenges that powered wheelchair drivers and their caregivers can face every single day, even if I wasn’t the one sitting in the wheelchair.