our future public transport system, including hs2, must actively include disabled people
Cleaner air benefits all of us, especially children and marginalised people – including disabled children – who are made vulnerable to some of the worst health impacts of air pollution.
Piecemeal clean air initiatives such as the expansion of the Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) to Greater London and School Streets are steps in the right direction, but they only really make sense as part of a broader integrated vision that must rely upon improved public infrastructure.
Ultimately, a transition away from the private car and towards active travel and public transport will remind us of our essential interdependence, countering the harmful and inherently divisive neoliberalist narrative that artificially atomises individuals and families, causing us to lose a fundamental part of who we are in the context of others.
In the absence of this philosophical dimension that well-designed public transport represents, we are susceptible to normalising dangerous social green lights to go ahead and ‘other’ disabled people, segregating and failing valuable members of society.
Trains and well-designed public infrastructure must actively include disabled people from the word go; not as the peripheral afterthoughts characteristic of ‘exemptions’ that disabled people have become so used to.
If we are serious about climate justice, we need to start honest conversations about social equity with explicit reference to meaningfully – and therefore radically – inclusive active travel and public transport infrastructure, led by disabled people and carers.
Let’s join up our thinking to transform society for the sake of the mental and physical health of succeeding generations. Clean air is a basic human right that must benefit all leaving no-one behind, and therefore well-designed public infrastructure is necessary for social and climate justice.