Last week, Governor Gavin Newsom proclaimed July as Disability Pride Month, marking the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law on July 26, 1990. According to Governor Newsom’s proclamation, the ADA was a major milestone for civil rights in the United States, “prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in all areas of public life and eliminating barriers to employment, transportation, public services, and other important areas.”
More than 7% of BART riders have disabilities, and BART is continually working to make our system as easy to use as possible for everyone who rides and counts on us. Our work is ongoing.
This month, BART is celebrating riders with disabilities and the contributions they make to our transit system and our communities.
Let’s start with the Harold Wilson story, published in 2022.
When Harold Wilson was 21 years old, his life changed forever.
A native of West Virginia, Wilson ran out of money and dropped out of college to work as a coal miner. About two years into his work in the mines, in February 1948, Wilson was involved in a falling slate accident that left him with severe spinal injuries, broken ribs, and a fractured spine.
Wilson’s tragic accident sparked a lifelong advocacy effort. His work to raise awareness and ensure rights and access continues to impact freedom and mobility for public transportation users across the country. Thanks to Wilson’s efforts in the 1960s, BART became the first public transportation system in the nation with accessible trains and stations.
“After Wilson, skeptics will never again be able to argue that trains can’t be wheelchair accessible,” Doris Sammes Fleischer and Frida Sammes write in The Disability Rights Movement.
Four months after the accident, Wilson was transferred by train to the Kaiser Foundation Rehabilitation Center in Vallejo. It was a lucky move that would change his life and the trajectory of public transportation forever. During his two years at the facility, Wilson underwent intensive physical therapy and multiple surgeries. Doctors told him he would likely be in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
In 1950, Wilson joined Bank of America and married Patricia Reister, who had been part of the nursing staff that treated him at Kaiser. Six years later, he earned a business administration degree from Golden Gate College and a year after that was hired as an accountant for the Kaiser Foundation Health Care Program. Wilson continued to work at Kaiser in various roles throughout his life, retiring in 1977 as senior financial analyst for the Kaiser Foundation Health Plan.
“Kaiser Permanente is fortunate to have such a dedicated and influential employee as Harold Wilson, who has done great work advocating for the needs of people with disabilities who have historically been overlooked, and he has made significant improvements to the situation,” said Quong Le, a historian of nonprofit health care providers.
During the years that Wilson lived in the Bay Area, news of the upcoming construction of a rapid transit system to connect the area had excited the region. Wilson’s excitement took a turn when he learned that the system, called the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, or BART, would not be accessible to people with disabilities. At the time, 4 percent of the Bay Area’s population had severe mobility limitations, meaning that people with disabilities would be excluded from the BART system’s ridership.
“When the system was built in the ’60s, elevators weren’t even considered,” said Bob Franklin, BART’s director of customer access and accessibility. “It was a total afterthought.”
Wilson contacted BART and offered to serve as a “volunteer consultant” to the BART board, beginning in 1964. He had a unique and compassionate approach to advocacy, according to people who knew and worked with him.
“His proposal was something so novel for rapid transit that no one had ever tried it before,” BART Transportation Superintendent A.E. Wolf told Accent on Living in the spring of 1973. “It raised all sorts of problems, the costs were enormous, and most of our staff, including myself, were reluctant.”
“But he didn’t threaten, picket, sulk or lose patience,” Wolf continued. “Instead, he was professional, personable, firm and persistent. As a result, he won the support of our entire board and maintained friendly relationships with our staff.”
Wilson’s approach was to “sell” people on the idea of an accessible BART system by reaching out to them one by one, having personal conversations with them, and slowly winning them over to his cause.
According to Michael Healy’s “BART: A Dramatic History of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System,” Wilson told BART’s board and staff in 1963 that “we could pioneer the first major public transportation system accessible to people with disabilities.”
Wilson’s approach worked: in 1968, the BART Commission asked the California State Legislature for $7 million to incorporate accessible elevators into its plans (this amount was later revised to $10 million).
Wilson’s work didn’t stop there: he and BART representatives continued to lobby the city of Sacramento until March 1969, when $150 million in additional funding was allocated to make the system wheelchair accessible under construction. Wilson’s guidance and persistence kept BART ahead of its time; it would be more than 20 years before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became law.
Among the facilities provided by the funding are elevators at all stations, telephones in elevators and at stations for wheelchair users, special service gates and handrails, Braille signage on elevator door frames, loudspeaker announcements, closed-circuit television where necessary, and the elimination of barriers between platforms and trains.
Since Wilson’s advocacy, BART has added more accessibility features to its system. For more information, visit bart.gov/guide/accessibility.
After BART was built, Wilson continued to promote accessibility. In 1971, Wilson and BART’s chief architect, Wilmot R. McCutchen, testified before the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. Their testimony was “an important precursor to raising public awareness of disability access issues,” Healy wrote in her book on BART. In the years following Wilson’s lobbying, a vibrant movement for disability rights and independent living emerged.
Wilson died in the Bay Area in 1994.
His legacy still resonates across the nation: Following BART, the newly constructed transit systems WMATA and MARTA also made their systems barrier-free, setting a new precedent for future public transportation.
“All of this was made possible because one man had a brilliant dream and made it a reality,” Wolff was quoted as saying by the magazine in 2008.
Dennis Figueroa, executive director of the Hudson Valley Center for Independent Living and a longtime public transit advocate, noted that public transportation has “come a long way in terms of accessibility” since the 1950s and 1960s.
“When Wilson first started, there was no expectation of transit access,” she said by phone. “What’s changed over the years is that the public now expects transit access, even for people who don’t have disabilities.”
Figueroa said the transportation mindset is often “it’s not my problem,” and agencies frequently cite cost as a blocking factor.
“The argument was always, ‘It’s too expensive,'” she says. That changed with the passage of the ADA (1990) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (1973), which requires public entities that receive federal funding to ensure that people with disabilities are not discriminated against or denied goods or services.
Today, BART continues to strengthen its efforts to make the system accessible to all riders. The transit agency hosts the BART Accessibility Task Force on the fourth Thursday of each month, providing a forum for the public to voice concerns, ask questions, and provide input. BART, which recognizes ADA accessibility by law, also encourages riders to make reasonable modification requests if their needs are not met.
Franklin concluded by saying that when transportation is available to everyone, everyone benefits.
“It’s now federal law, and everyone has access to it,” he said, “and if you design it that way, everyone can benefit. The more universally you can design it, the better.”