Have you ever gone to a station to board a train and found yourself, rather than waiting on the platform, on the tracks? No? It's probably because you're not blind. If you were blind, you might have found yourself in Abdul Esener’s situation, on the tracks, a minute before a non-stop goods train came hurtling down the line.
Abdul, with the support of law firm Leigh Day, is now taking legal action against Network Rail and Northern and Avanti, the railway companies, regarding their respective failures to provide tactile paving and passenger assistance.
Abdul should have had passenger assistance, which he had booked, to help him too, but because of a missed connection, the staff went home, leaving him stranded without help, on a platform with no tactile paving so he could find the edge of the platform. Often a lack of passenger assistance is just (just – ha!) a massive inconvenience which leaves you stranded miles from home in chronic pain and tears (happens all the time – no really, it does, and it’s inexcusable). But in cases like this, it can lead to death.
The rail industry is looking to cut staffing further, which will mean less staff on platforms and potentially almost none at all in ticket offices – there are big plans to cut ticket offices out of the equation entirely.
Platform staff are often missing during rush hours leaving Disabled people up a gumtree. Currently, platform staff have good safeguarding training, although there are still often not enough to meet the current need. So cutting staff will lead to a bigger safeguarding gap. Which means Disabled people will risk literally falling through the gaps between trains and platforms.
We’ve got a major problem with many stations still not having edge-of-platform tactile paving (lumpy bumpy edge-of-platform or pavement paving which is absolutely essential to ensure that visually impaired people don't end up walking in front of cars or trains). 40% of mainlines stations lack this paving.
Abdul’s issues were at Manchester Piccadilly – one of the major travel gateways in the north of England. Around a sixth of accidents involving people falling off platform edges at stations involve visually impaired people.
Those in charge seem to have had a problem with installing tactile paving at all stations for years. Because, despite the Equality Act insisting that all businesses make reasonable adjustments, there never seems to be a speedy reasonable adjustment made until somebody actually dies.
Network Rail has pledged to add tactile paving to all platforms by 2025. That’s not far off. We’re keeping beady eyes on our stations to see if it will honour this pledge.
The same safety issues apply to roads. I've spoken to countless local authorities about why really dangerous junctions are left with really dangerous crossings which can't be made safe until somebody dies. And the answer is always the same: death triggers funding.
And there was me thinking blood libation and human sacrifice had been left behind in the dark ages. It seems it has crossed over from religion into the banality of local authority budgets and bureaucracy.
The Direct Action Network of Disabled people and the Disabled singer Johnny Crescendo had t-shirts with ‘tragic but brave’ on them in the early 90s. Nothing has changed. Society still needs tragedy before action, especially when it comes to Disabled people (it’s something we saw during the pandemic too when two thirds of the lives wiped out by Covid were Disabled people’s. So tragic. So brave. So jaw-droppingly unbelievable that we are still, as a demographic, put in this position – bottom of the survival pile).
There is still a gross Darwinistic approach to basic dignified health and safety in this country. When we know the risks – when we know that a lack of basic safety measures WILL, at some point, result in a death, why does it still boil down to needing that death to do something? Shall we reverse the roles in the cosmic game and put the decision makers on the train track? Would that help with the mental shift needed to speed up safety? What does it take to get people to start putting people first? To stop the cognitive dissonance between fully understanding the weight of putting lives in the firing line instead of weighing them up on some bonkers metaphorical scale against costs and paperwork?
I NEVER want to read about the severed body of one of my community on a train track because Network Rail was too busy dragging its heels to put lumps on the edge of its paving. Ditto unsafe road junctions and crossings. Do you?
