May 12, 2009... »

May 12, 2009 - Eyes and mouths opened wide as commuters at the Jackson Street Blue Line station turned to watch a young man in a wheelchair casually roll onto an escalator and pass them on his way up, his arms firmly grasping the handrails to brace himself as he left the platform below. Steve Bramlett hasn't always been disabled, but... »

May 12, 2009 - Advocates for the disabled say the CTA needs to step up its commitment to making its bus and rail stations accessible in the wake of a three-month investigation by ChicagoTalks. “The CTA has to continue working on these issues to make the whole system user friendly,” said Jim Watkins, co-chairman of the Regional Transportation Authority’s ADA Advisory... »

May 12, 2009 - One morning in November 2004, a CTA bus stopped at Catalpa and Broadway in Uptown for a woman and her daughter, who was using a motorized wheelchair because she had torn a ligament in her foot. As the daughter wheeled up to the bus lift, she got stuck and couldn't move her scooter. “The operator kept saying f-ing this... »

May 12, 2009 - On a cold November day in 2007, Georgia Willis sat on her scooter as a CTA bus lift lowered her to the ground. Before she knew it, the scooter had tipped off the lift and she hit her face on the bike rack and was underneath the 40-foot, 27,000-pound bus. The driver of the Addison 152... »

May 12, 2009 - Nearly 20 years after the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act took effect and nine years after being sued in federal court, the CTA is still not readily accessible to hundreds of thousands of disabled Chicagoans. Since the 1990 passage of the ADA, fixed-route public transit systems like the CTA have taken steps to become accessible, including installing... »

May 12, 2009 - Kevin Irvine was frustrated. The chairman of the CTA’s ADA Advisory Committee kept asking questions about performance reports, Web site updates and bus lift failures. But each time, he couldn’t get an answer from the Chicago Transit Authority's long-time ADA compliance officer, Christine Montgomery. To each of his questions, she responded:  I don’t know. I’ll have... »