For most of her life, Carlos Clarke Drazen has had to navigate her wheelchair over, through, and around obstacles. But nothing has proved so confusing or treacherous as RTA and CTA rules and regulations, which soon may leave her stuck on a street corner without a way to get to work. “In many ways it’s painfully ironic,” says Drazen, a 46-year-old native Chicagoan. “I may have to give up my job–not because of any condition, but because I can’t get there.”
She soon learned that the CTA provides door-to-door “paratransit” service for disabled commuters, as long as the RTA approves them for such services. So she had her doctor send a letter explaining her condition to the RTA. “They signed me up without any problem,” she says. “The van comes at 7:30. I wait in my lobby. When I see it, I roll out. It drops me off at work, and then it takes me back home in the afternoon.”
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But early last year Drazen received a notice from the RTA telling her that she would have to be “recertified” for home-to-work service. “Only now,” she says, “the recertification procedure had changed.”
Drazen wrote back to the RTA requesting an appeal, as its regulations allow. Several months passed, and then on March 13 she got a telephone call from Nancy Corral, a CTA official. “She left me a message on the office phone informing me that my paratransit ends as of Friday, March 16,” says Drazen. “Needless to say, I was in a panic.”
That issue is now the subject of a lawsuit filed against the CTA by Equip for Equality, a disability-rights advocacy group. “Our suit focuses on those buses and trains that the CTA alleges are accessible,” says Barry Taylor, Equip’s legal advocacy director. “We’ve put together about 300 complaints. It could be that drivers refuse to deploy the lifts or pick up disabled passengers, or there could be gaps between the trains and the platform, or the elevators at train stations are broken. This is an enforcement case. We’re trying to make sure the CTA’s following the law that already exists.”
Noelle Gaffney, spokeswoman for the CTA, says a CTA inspector rode Drazen’s route, taking the Division Street bus to Ashland and the Ashland bus to Roosevelt. “We examined her route,” she says, “and determined that it was accessible.”
