A woman walked into the PT booth at Parkex and started to talk to me about disabled drivers, ‘blue badges’ and disabled motoring in the UK. She is the editor of Disabled Motoring UK Magazine and her cover article this month is on a crackdown on “Blue Badge” cheaters in the London Borough of Brixton. For those of you not anglophiles “Blue badge” is the term for disabled drivers who have permits to park in disabled spaces. By the way, the term is ‘Disabled” not handicapped.
Helen Dolphin is Director of Policy and Campaigns for Disabled Motoring as well as editor of their monthly magazine DM, Disabled Motoring UK
Mrs Dolphin spend a day on the streets of Brixton with a group of enforcement staff and writes a telling story about cracking down on violators. She will honor PT in the next few months with an article about the trials of the disabled as they deal with parking in the UK.
In the poster behind her in the picture above, she is with her pooch, Yancy, demonstrating the difficulty the disabled have even reaching a pay and display machine which is mounted behind a curb. She laughed when she told me that it really didn’t matter with her because she couldn’t operate the machine anyway.
I’ll tell you that I wouldn’t want this young woman on my case if I was the enforcement staff of a local authority in the UK. I read that she is a ‘keen’ swimmer and we find paralympic sports creeping into the editorial of her magazine, including fencing and goal ball.
She holds a pretty strong case why the disabled should pay a lower fee, or none at all for parking. But that’s for a later time when I will entice her to join us here on the blog as well as in the pages of PT.
JVH
One Response
It will be interesting to hear the case for free, unlimited parking for disabled drivers. The perspective on abuse should be presented as well. Should be a lively exchange.