Cities have become a little more accessible for people with mobility disabilities. However, most of the time, going out on the street becomes an odyssey full of obstacles that make it impossible to exercise the rights of people with disabilities in Argentina.
On Accessibility Day, Claudio Waisbord, founder of the Access Ya organization, comments that there are two types of problems to solve: “On the one hand, in the ranking of quantity, there is the transport and education in the quality ranking “.
Although more than 25 years have passed since the passing of law 24,314 on accessibility of people with reduced mobility, which established “the removal of physical barriers in the urban areas, architecture and transport”, much remains to be done. “There are dozens of places that are not accessible: because the elevator is narrow, because there are four steps at the entrance or because the bathrooms are too small,” Claudio says.
In terms of mobility, difficulties arise both when using private and the public transport. “Taxis don’t stop because they don’t want to take the wheelchair. The buses, although adapted, do not slow because the drivers do not know how to operate them and the subway has almost no accessible stations and the machinery is broken,” he says. On the other hand, he emphasizes that many people with disabilities don’t take to the streets because they don’t know what they’re going to find.
