Right, let’s see what I can do. I think the main difficulty will be that I am trying to look at these issues objectively, whereas your approach is more like “Those who are not for us are against us”. I’ll explain later why I think that interpretation is justified.
The National Implementation Plan for the Accessibility of the UK Rail System for Persons with Disabilities and Persons with Reduced Mobility defines disability as
“A physical or mental impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person’s ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.”
That’s quite a broad definition, and it covers many conditions that do not actually make it difficult or impossible for a person to get onto a train and make a journey. But what’s involved in making trains PRM-TSI complaint? The document I referred to above lists:-
1. Audio-visual Passenger Information Systems;
2. Contrasting floors/handrails/handholds;
3. Tactile/palm-operable/contrasting door controls;
4. Priority seats;
5. Mandated numbers of wheelchair spaces;
6. An accessible toilet (if toilets are fitted); and
7. Compliant boarding ramps.
If a train hasn’t been modified, it probably won’t have the features above apart from nos. 1 and 3. No. 4 can possibly be provided by designating certain seats as “priority”, and I assume that no. 7 can be provided internally in place of a non-compliant ramp (though I don’t know whether trains do actually carry a ramp of either kind), or externally at stations. The biggest omission will be no. 6, the accessible toilet.
How many potential passengers will be completely unable to travel if the features in that list aren’t provided? A person who is totally blind, i.e. with no vision at all, wouldn’t benefit from the visual part of a passenger information system or from the contrasting floors, etc., whereas a person with very limited vision (who may technically be registered as blind) may benefit from those things. There are probably some people in each of those groups who can and do travel in non-compliant trains, while others don’t feel confident to do so. They may rely on the audio part of the PIS, in contrast to those with a hearing loss like Greybeard33 in post 132, who benefit more from the visual screens, though aren’t necessarily dependent on them. Persons whose disability consists of a mental impairment may not directly depend on any of the listed modifications, though they may be reassured by the audio and visual information, or by the availability of a priority seat.
The most obvious PRM modification is the provision of a toilet accessible and usable by somebody in a wheelchair, which has become a principal focus of discussion, as hwl observed in post 133. But by no means all wheelchair users will need a toilet in the course of a train journey, and they will be able to get on board many non-complaint trains with the assistance of a ramp and somebody to support their use of it. Bikeman78 referred to this in post 111, in a slightly different context.
There may not be a dedicated space for them once they’re there.
There’s also the fact that what’s going to happen on 1st January is not the end of compliance, but a postponement while trains that were expected to have been introduced by now are brought into service, enabling the withdrawal of a limited number of trains that were expected to have gone already. That may be tough if somebody’s service is entirely operated by those trains and they were relying on the new ones being available by now, but it won’t be a step backwards for most people, and perhaps not for anyone. The most problematic areas appear to be East Midlands and Greater Anglia, where non-compliant trains will remain in service the longest.
All those considerations led to my suggestion in post 134 that “It may be that the number of people who really are adversely affected by the continuing operation of some non-compliant trains is tiny”. There is nothing there that can be interpreted as “So eff them and eff the deadline, huh? Minorities go away, railways are not for you!” as you put it in post 135, and nothing that amounts to “basically abandoning a minority who have been lied to that trains would be accessible by 2020”, as you said in post 139.
What you’ve said there is one of the reasons for the way I characterised your approach in the first paragraph. Minorities have not been “abandoned”; but some of the people who depend on a train to have an accessible toilet will have to wait longer before they can make regular train journeys. Nor have they been “lied to”, which implies a deliberate case of deception. In post 124 you said
“Why would PRMs care if non-PRM trains get withdrawn? We can't use them anyway! It might concentrate PUM minds on actually fixing the problems!”
If members of a minority don’t wish to understand the consequences of withdrawing non-PRM trains, some members of the majority may start to feel unwilling to consider the minority’s needs. Such an outcome would not just disadvantage the minority, but would tend to damage everybody’s relationship with others.
