By Saada Branker
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In 2017, the Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) launched two lawsuits against New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) on behalf of a coalition of disability rights groups. The suit accused the authority of systemic exclusion of disabled individuals and elevator maintenance neglect. Sasha Blair-Goldensohn was one of the plaintiffs. Getting to his job at Google, he had no direct route due to inaccessible stations. That inaccessibility meant that Sasha had to transfer and use four elevators. His testimonial back then captured the reality for far too many subway commuters in New York City: “The lack of elevators doubles my commute time, at best. And if just one elevator is out of service, I’m stuck,” said Sasha. “I never know when I’ll have to ask strangers to carry me up the stairs in my wheelchair. It’s nerve-wracking, dangerous, and degrading.”
Sasha also attended rallies, demonstrating with advocacy groups comprised of people with disabilities and abled allies. Together they demanded change and compliance with the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). Their message: Elevators are for everyone. Six years later, one of the lawsuits came to a settlement binding the MTA to make 95% of its subway stations ADA-accessible with elevators and/or ramps by 2055. In April this year, a Manhattan federal judge officially approved the settlement, marking a significant victory for disability rights. The MTA has meanwhile stepped up its pace, recently installing six ADA-compliant elevators in stations on two subway lines and bringing the number of accessible stations to 151. The New York City subway system has 472 stations.
SASHA: It’s certainly not over. There’s a second part of the case which is that the elevators not only have to exist, [they have] to be reliable. And right now, they’re not. We’re still fighting in court to force them to commit to a reliability standard, beyond sort of a best effort. This is not only a nice thing and a moral thing, but simply a business benefit that when elevators are reliable, more people will take the subway, more young families with strollers are going to settle here; more older people want to retire here, etc. And it seems so obvious. But then on the other side, there’s still a thought: Oh, this is a cost. There’s those kinds of objections. It makes you want to stay out there and keep having those wins.
A Google eye imagining elite athletes getting around in Paris.
The wins are coming. A couple of years ago, Sasha and his Google Maps team turned their attention to the upcoming Paralympic Games in Paris. They talked about a “ton of disabled people, athletes, coming to Paris this late August.” The team recognized the great opportunity to help Paralympians, their families, and coaches get around using Google Maps. Within the team they raised awareness of their role to ensure the Map features works well in Paris, generating momentum from that point. It worked.
SASHA: “The good news is that that we succeeded, and I got a lot of helpers, within Maps and volunteers on engineering, but also on the on the advertising and media side, to see this as a worthwhile task. We’re working really hard on that.”
Sasha and a team – two other wheelchair users and two others that are blind – got to travel together to Birmingham, Alabama in March. They visited the location where The US Paralympic wheelchair rugby team practiced. Stoked by the idea of meeting these elite athletes, Sasha’s own team was also eager to learn first-hand the experience of traveling through an unfamiliar setting and using Google Maps as a tool to get around.
SASHA: “Like what works, what could be better, and then also hear from the athletes and what their experience has been. They go to tournaments and competitions all over the world all the time. They’re hopefully going to be some of them in Paris this summer. It’s a great opportunity to make friends and form community, and I’m looking forward to that.”
Using AI to optimize for better accessibility.
Looking ahead at the role AI can play in accessible travel is a huge topic, but not an entirely new concept. Sasha referred to the way AI has already been in use for some of the techniques for making statistical estimates.
SASHA: “Practically, we’ll meet deciding in Google Maps to put the wheelchair icon on a place to indicate that it has a wheelchair accessible entrance or with a strikethrough to indicate that it does not. We only put those if we have high confidence it does exist or it’s true that it does not exist.
“You’re dealing with all that information and saying out of that, is it? Are we confident? Yes. Are we confident? No. That estimation uses this same kind of algorithms that AI uses to choose whether to make a right or a left turn, or go straight when it’s driving the car, and that those techniques are all related. So, the AI is really deep in these systems.”
In talking about the way some corporations or entities don’t get the value of inclusion for people with disabilities, Sasha expressed hope that they can come to recognize it’s not about a moral or generous thing to do.
SASHA: “Making, say, airline flights accessible is good business and will increase revenue. And you can actually model those things in a statistical way and say, ‘Well, there’s this many disabled people, there’s this many flights, there’s, etcetera, … we should just do this.’ And because there are a lot of things that are hidden, because of systemic inequality, a lot of places are not accessible in public transit and in public places. You might not see that many wheelchair users or there might be some disabilities that are invisible. From a pure demographics [point], I think a lot of those systems that are trying to optimize for profit may also optimize for accessibility. That might seem like a pipe dream, but I believe that it’s true. So, as a believer in the power of these intelligent systems to do the rational thing, I’m hopeful there’s an upside there.”