You may be wondering what “Respect The Stripes” is all about. You may even be asking “What stripes?” The stripes I’m referring to are the stripes that are beside a parking space reserved for handicap vehicles.
There are way too many people that think that the stripes don’t matter. They are very wrong. These stripes designate where the ramp is that will allow a wheelchair, a scooter, or a walker to be able to come into a building where there is a sidewalk with a curb at the entrance to the building.
Most handicap equipped vehicles have a side entrance for the wheelchair ramp or the lift, whichever the case may be. Whenever a vehicle parks in the striped area, the handicapped person, that has a side loading vehicle, is not able to park in the handicapped spot. This is because they know that they cannot lower their ramp or lift to get their wheelchair or scooter out.
Even worse is if the handicapped person is already in the building. Say they stopped in to get a cola and a sandwich before they went to an appointment. They come out and find that they cannot even get back into their car. They are stranded so to speak. Now they are going to be late, at best, for their appointment, if they even make the appointment at all.
This is especially true if the owner, of the wrongly parked car, happens to be in a strip mall with several businesses. It’s anybody’s guess as to where the owner of the car went. The handicapped person could call the police, to come and ticket the wrongly parked car and have the car towed away. But chances are that that would take too long. So the only thing that they can do is wait for the owner of the wrongly parked car to return and move it.
Watch the video below to see what I mean. Maybe after watching the video, you can pass the word to family and friends not to park on the stripped spaces beside a handicapped parking spot. Even if it is “only for a minute”, that is 60 seconds too long for the handicapped person to have to wait.
I can give you an example of that happening in real life. Some people might say that the video was just a cartoon. Yes it was in a cartoon format, but its’ message is very real.
Yesterday my friends experienced this firsthand. They had gone to one appointment and had time (about 30 minutes) to get something to eat, before their ride would come to take them to their next appointment. They use a transportation service just for handicapped people.
My friend, that is in the wheelchair, is diabetic and was needing to get something to eat. They went to a Kentucky Fried Chicken(KFC) in Lexington, KY to eat their lunch. They were going to go to the buffet, to make sure that they would be finished eating by the time their ride arrived. When they arrived, there was a commercial vehicle blocking the handicap ramp in to KFC. My friends asked the driver to move his vehicle. The driver wouldn’t move his vehicle, he would only offer to help my friend to get his power wheelchair up the curb and into the building.
Power wheelchairs have to be handled very carefully so as not to break any of the automatic components on the chair. There are many various adaptations that can be made to power wheelchairs, depending on what the individual person needs. Needless to say, my friend can not allow anybody, that is not specially trained in moving the power wheelchairs, to move his chair.
With my friend being diabetic, he had to get something to eat or he would end up having to be rushed to the hospital. That left them no choice but to wait, and that being the case, they had to cancel their ride to his next appointment. It took the driver of the commercial vehicle 41 minutes to move his vehicle. With having to miss his next appointment, my friend now has to set up another time for the transportation service to come to take them to the new appointment that he has to make.
An official complaint against Kentucky Fried Chicken was made, when my friends got home.
