- The DOT is making billions of dollars in investments to improve accessibility for disabled travelers.
- Advocates say the DOT under Buttigieg is making unprecedented steps in the right direction.
- Buttigieg said the department is using its power to require better training for employees at airlines and other transportation services who interact with disabled travelers.
I had the opportunity to sit down with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg last week. He told me about what the department he oversees is doing to boost accessibility for disabled travelers across the country’s transportation network.
During our conversation, Buttigieg highlighted billions of dollars in investments the Department of Transportation is making to improve the physical infrastructure at airports, railroad stations and on other surface transportation networks. He also said the department is using its power to require better training for employees at airlines and other transportation services who interact with disabled travelers. Further, it’s establishing new rules to hold airlines and other transportation companies more accountable when things go wrong for disabled passengers.
While talk from the top is great, what really matters is disabled travelers’ actual experiences. There’s a lot of work to be done to make transportation in the U.S. fully accessible, but advocates say the DOT under Buttigieg is making unprecedented steps in the right direction.
Here’s what they told me has worked so far, and what they hope to see more of in the future.
How we got here
Transportation, especially air travel, has long been a sticking point for accessibility.
“We are almost 40 years after the passage of the Air Carrier Access Act,” Heather Ansley, Chief Policy Officer at Paralyzed Veterans of America, told me. She was referring to the legislation that regulates accessibility on airplanes as the Americans with Disabilities Act does in most other venues. “We’ve been trying to do this for a long time, but we are making progress.”
Travelers who rely on mobility devices say it’s all too common for those devices to get damaged while they’re flying, and that when it happens it’s much more devastating than a simple broken suitcase. In previous reporting on this topic, I was told time and again by disabled travelers that arriving to find their wheelchair had been damaged was like having their legs broken as they got off the plane.
“Every wheelchair user I know who has traveled by air has some kind of horror story, some kind of incident or set of incidents they experienced,” Buttigieg said during our interview.
According to the DOT airlines mishandle 1% to 1.5% of the mobility devices they carry, equating to 11,527 reports of damage in 2023.
Advocates say the airlines’ performance is getting better – the overall rate of damage declined slightly between 2022 and 2023 – but there’s still more work to be done.
“This DOT and Secretary Pete Buttigieg is doing an astounding job to working to make improvements for accessible air travel and creating the path, providing the pathway for the industry to do that,” Michele Erwin, president and founder of All Wheels Up, told me. “I personally feel the commitment from the DOT and because the DOT is so engaged in this the industry is listening. They are watching what the DOT is doing and they’re reacting.”
Where we’re going
Buttigieg acknowledged that, despite billions of dollars in recent accessibility investments, the transportation sector is going to be hard to make fully accessible.
“We’re going to continue advancing both on the physical infrastructure side and on the training and enforcement side, because I think you need all of those were working together in order to deliver a better experience,” he said. “The need is going to outrun the funding that we have. So as we start thinking about the next step, when the current infrastructure law expires in 2026, I hope we’ll have demonstrated why accessibility needs to be in the center of these conversations going into the next infrastructure package.”
Advocates said they appreciate the efforts DOT has already made but agreed that there’s more work to be done. Part of that work includes broadening the scope of who these initiatives are meant to help.
“I don’t want to say it’s the golden age, because I haven’t been through everything, but it has been an opportunity to see some real pain points be addressed,” Ansley said. “We need to continue to work towards transportation systems that can accommodate the diversity of people here in the United States, which includes people that use wheelchairs and have other types of disabilities.”
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Erwin agreed that all kinds of disabilities – not just those that require the use of mobility devices – need to be better addressed by future accessibility programs, and she also hopes to see continued investment in improved training.
“In regards to what we’d like to see for the future, they’re working on training and that’s a really hot topic,” she said.
The DOT is also working with industry stakeholders to develop regulations and products that will allow wheelchair users to travel safely in their wheelchair, rather than checking it. That has long been a goal of disability advocates, and a number of prototypes are in development and approval stages, including one by Delta Flight Products that would allow for in-cabin wheelchair securement.
What Buttigieg wants travelers to know
Buttigieg told me during our interview that some of the initiatives he’s most excited about revolve around new rulemaking that will improve things for travelers with all kinds of disabilities, not just updates to physical infrastructure.
The DOT will soon finalize a rule that will tighten regulations on airlines that mishandle wheelchairs, and he said that’s likely to have an outsize impact on the travelers who rely on them.
“It proposes that there’s annual training, that there’s hands on training, that contractors as well as employees who physically assist passengers have to get trained. But I also think equally important is the accountability side. So part of what this rule would do is it would make clear that it’s automatically a violation of the Air Carrier Access Act if a device is mishandled,” he said. “I think with that kind of financial accountability, that’s going to work wonders for the airlines’ training programs because they will have more on the line, on their bottom line, when it comes to employees actually knowing what to do and following through.”
Buttigieg also added that travelers whose mobility devices are damaged will soon be able to choose their own vendors for repair, rather than rely on the airline’s contractors as happens under the current system.
“When I just think back to the stories I’ve heard from friends and travelers who have been in this situation, being at the mercy of a vendor chosen by the airline and its own timeline has been something that has often added additional frustration to what’s already an unacceptable experience,” he said.
The advocates I spoke to say they’re optimistic about the prospects for progress.
“We have never seen this type of one, momentum, but two, speed, to make improvements and change ever before,” Erwin said. “We need to recognize it’s never happened this fast before, and I do think it’s because of Secretary Pete Buttigieg and his commitment to improving accessibility to air travel for people with disabilities.”
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter based in New York. You can reach him at [email protected].