Yesterday on my Claims and Issues Blog, I wrote an article based on this quote from an article by Professor Ron Buliung of the University of Toronto, Despite Legislative Progress, Accessible Cities Remain Elusive The Conversation (online Jan. 24, 2024):
Disability as an afterthought makes platform and vehicle retrofit an inconvenient, costly necessity. The technical part of this problem can likely be solved with existing technology, like platform gap fillers and bridge plates. Waiting around for disabled passengers to engage in class-action litigation is not an effective strategy.
Buliung, who specializes in disability studies and transport geography, was specifically commenting on subway platforms and trains that are too high in the air for many disabled people to access, such that "platform gap fillers and bridge plates" exist to literally fill the gaps and bridge the heights. Whether that is enough will depend on how you react to reading the rest of his article.
But it is certainly true in my experience that litigation is a poor way to make policy. "Waiting around for disabled passengers" to solve the gaps and scale the heights at subway platforms by any kind of litigation, including the "class-action litigation" he specifically mentions, is not a good option.
Litigation usually depends on one case at a time. It is rare for litigation to affect the outcomes of many cases all at once. Moreover, lawyers in litigation owe their loyalties to their clients, not to society as a whole. They work to obtain the result that is best for their client, not the result that is best for, say, America.
That is why the results of individual cases are not very satisfactory to large groups of people. Sometimes, though, litigation is the only option to make policy. That is a great sadness of our time.
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