Truly free travel

When, asks Peter White, does an offer of customer service hamper independence. When we’re obliged to take it up

Birmingham New Street Station has cut down its concourse announcements, seriously compromising the ability of people with poor sight and those with reading difficulties to travel independently.

Specifically, they have done away with the announcements which tell you which platform your train is leaving from. They will still be announcing platform changes, making the assumption that you already know your train’s platform, and announcing incoming trains “on the platform from where they are leaving”, assuming that you’ve already got there.

When asked how people in this situation are supposed to know where their train is leaving from, we’re told that we can either go to passenger information (will there be announcements to say where passenger information is?), or that we can pre-book, 24 or in
some cases even 48 hours in advance. Again an assumption: that we are frail and fragile, and need to place ourselves totally into the loving arms of customer care: oh, and that we don’t mind turning up about 30 minutes early.

I really did hope we had dealt with this business about the need for announcements once and for all years ago, but it seems that now we’ve made our point about their necessity on the trains, they’ve decided to remove them from the stations instead. I had thought the message had got through: that this is a basic issue of accessibility, as sacrosanct as providing ramped or level access for wheelchair users.

But it seems to me that there is a potentially more threatening idea at work, which all disabled people would do well to watch out for! Many of these so-called services – and I would define a service as something you can either choose, or choose not to avail yourself of – are regarded as essential to cover companies both for insurance, and for ticking boxes to stay within anti-discrimination law. It is but a short step from there, to the assumption that these services are not voluntary, but the appropriate way for disabled people to travel, whether they want to or not, and that refusal to do so begins to be regarded as some kind of deviant, or awkward behaviour.

Once it is considered okay to remove services that allow you to travel independently, to be replaced by “rules” on how you should travel, a very important principle has been breached. People will have to start asking themselves whether they are better off now, “looked after” on the company’s terms, or, as in the past, discriminated against, but free?