Episode 59: Stuck On The Side Of The Road For Four Hours Because Of A Wheelchair

So we're currently in Wentworth Falls right now, which is in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales for people who aren't really familiar with the geography of Australia.

We do have listeners that are in 64 countries, obviously for obvious reasons, might not know where the Blue Mountains is.

Public transport has been, at least in my eyes, a real issue.

Accessing it, frequency, finding where it is.

The Blue Mountains isn't like a metropolitan area where you might be able to easily go down the street or something like that.

So in your situation, SJ, maybe you've called like an accessible taxi driver that you might have known in the area to come and help you and you're not able to do that now.

You want to talk a little bit about it?

Look, we've had pretty much one wheelchair accessible cab servicing the whole Blue Mountains region, which is, you know, from the Nepean River all the way up to Lithgow.

And really, it's been this one bloke, his name's Brian, and he's throwing in the towel because he's such a dedicated, kind person.

He's exhausted because he does his best to try and help as many people as he can, but he's a one-man band, so he's actually throwing in his taxi licence.

And what that means is there's now no taxi for the region.

And last night I met with some local community community members that use brian as a service and we were having a dinner to thank him and farewell him and you know he he has enjoyed meeting the community and really appreciates the the role that he's played but i'm not quite sure what's going to happen next

Yeah, because when I was growing up, there were two people who drove wheelchair accessible taxis in the Blue Mountains and then there was one.

The importance of being able to have access to transport in a regional area, people don't understand it.

Well, they might not understand it.

They don't understand what an absolute blow to the community is because there's only one left.

What do you think we need to be thinking about when it comes to public transportation of this sort of nature? Because you can't guarantee that everybody in a wheelchair will be able to get on a bus or to be able to access a train station.

It might not be near them.

Certainly in the Blue Mountains, there are a lot of hills.

It might not be feasibly possible for them to be able to mobilise to get over there in the first place.

What's something like not having access to... specifically taxis due to to somebody's confidence to you know what it means to be an independent person with a disability