I wanted to thanks NAR for the drive-thru story from the other day. This story: This Is Clearly My Invisible Boatmobile!
It reminded me to add something to my Paralives brainstorm for the month (about town services and business) and I mentioned early in the week about accessibility standards. And the drive-thru story reminded me of adding a paragraph about drive-thrus to brainstorming
Those types of stories are so weird because people keep forgetting that these rules exist for a good reason, and getting hit by a moronic driver is not a pleasant experience.
As a comment on the story said European druve-thrus are more accommodating of all people being in the drive-thru (bikes, buggies-wagons?). The worrying of âsafety over convince of potential customers and patronâ seems to be a North American only thing .
In my country (Canada) which has no federal disability act thereâs been at least three stories in three different provinces about disabled people whom for reasons couldnât go into the location. I mentioned two of the stories on the story itself. All three versions mentions (popular Canadian Coffee chain). In the story from Nova Scotia I believe its the customerâs fault kind of. The customer is in a mobility scooter and at the time he was used to using the drive-thru at location 1 of the coffee chain and he was for some reason decided to go to location 2 for his and his wifeâs morning(?) coffee and went thru the drive thru. Why didnât he go inside to order? According to the article he said âit would take three men to get the scooter insideâ and once he got the coffee âthereâs no guarantee he could turn it around inside without accidently running someone over when backing up to turn around to leave the businessâ
For the New Brunswick case- The woman customer also uses a mobility scooter and the location she gets Coffee from she at the time would use the drive-thru because âshe has trouble navigating the scooter insideâ and âshe canât stand up unassistedâ so ever since being banned from the drive-thru the womanâs brother has to come with her to go inside to get her coffee as the brother in the article says âit robs her of independenceâ
Thereâs a story from my own town -that a local (coffee chain) refused to let someone whom couldnât come into the restaurant order at the drive-thru and all the other (coffee chain) locations in the region my town is located in all allow him to use the drive-thru. The same location also said 'if he didnât move they would call the cops".
Sometime last year a federal judge somewhere dismissed a blind personâs lawsuit bid from 2016(?) over a McDonaldâs refusing to allow a blind man to use the drive-thru late at night when the lobby/dinning room is closed for the night. The claim the federal judge made was the âMcDonald discriminated against him as a pedestrian and not as person with a disabilityâ and a similar lawsuit against the American Jack in the Box restaurant also got dropped for a simliar reason.
and before you tell blind people to have âa family member or friend or have them take a taxi or Uberâ remember needing an extra pair of hands (and eyes) to get through a drive-thru makes them loose their independence. And itâs really dangerous for blind people to use uber/taxis because it means, i belive that if the drive-thru doesnât have a long pole for POS bank machine that a blind person has to give their bank card and PIN to the driver.
Deaf and hard of hearing people also have problems with the drive-thrus as well. Like you know how crappy the American speakers are right? Well deaf/hard of hearing people canât use the speakers so instead they drive to the drive-thru window and use a writing tool and paper or use âwritingâ on their cell phone and show the order to the employee at the window. They been either told off for âslowing down the lineâ or be told âto come in to orderâ. Thereâs one story online that a deaf man was told he was faking being deaf and the restaurant employees threw away his food.
Someone on the Facebook comments of the same story was saying her father was in accident in the early days of Covid, and wrecked his only vehicle and after the father was out of the hospital he checked into a hotel room and had to rely on his daughter (the commenter?) to drive-him around because due to Covid lock down- all restaurants have closed dinning room locations and they refused to serve him on foot due to his lack of vehicle.
And I also know in the early days of Covid, that due to lobbies being closed-that (Canadian coffee chain) donât know about other restaurants- allowed truckers to be on foot in their drive-thrus because their trucks are too big to fit into the drive-thrus
Iâm not American, and itâs not.
Having a disability doesnât make you immune to reckless drivers. See what Saewen mentioned in this storyâs comments section. She lives in roughly the same area as I do, works at McDonaldâs⌠and has seen enough idiots driving through the drive through.
No, the drive through is no place for pedestrians.
There are times when we all must accept help. This isnât limited to blind people. My car is out of commission. If I want to go through a drive through, I must call a taxi too.
If you want to argue that fast food restaurants should have an after hours walk up window on the sidewalk/footpath, Iâd agree. Itâd make the restaurant more accessible, not just to the disabled, but to everyone. But a drive through is still too dangerous for people not in a car.
Heck, it can be dangerous even if you are in a car. I once had someone crash into my back bumper. Not sure why, as they could see me, and they could see there was a vehicle immediately in front of me (No, I didnât hit it). It didnât do any damage to my car, so I dismissed it⌠but imagine if that idiot had hit a person standing at the window.
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Sorry I disagree some locations like Coffee chains allowed truckers to be on foot due to their trucks during viral yuck. So if they can allow that, they can allow other people either in mobility scooters, disabled, poor, or on foot. Espically if the mobility scooter canât fit inside, or itâs late at night or a pandemic has shut down the dinning room/lobby areas.
It donât hold water that the drive-thru isnât safe. By that logic (âsafetyâ) reasons you might as well as not allow people to go inside the building ever because people are much more dangerous when they can go inside then at the drive-thru). And heck you migh as well ban people from walking across the street.
So why do a lot of European countries like Netherlands allow bikes in the drive-thru? They arenât cars?
How about we agree to disagree?
And you obviously missed my point for a blind person having to use a Uber or Lyft (if they have no avaible family or friends to drive them) if the drive-thru location doesnât have a pole for the debit/credit POS machine it means the customer has to hand not only their bank card over to the driver but also share their PIN as well. Thatâs number one rule of bank cards- DONâT SHARE YOUR PINS! isnât that dangerous and what if the driver decides to steal the customerâs identiy after dropping the customer back at home with the food?
With Uber they would have all that information already-the credit card number, and because of having to do the PIN pad themselves- they could easily steal a visually impaired personâs identiy with the bank card because of them having the CC number and PIN number
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