Q: How does someone in a wheelchair follow the law about using sidewalks if a sidewalk doesn’t have any sort of ramp to make it accessible for a wheelchair?
A: This question provides an opportunity to note the progress we’ve made in the area of mobility for people with disabilities. Do we have room to grow? Oh, yeah. Are we perfect? No way. Still, the response to this answer as recently as 1989 would be quite different from the answer today.
In order to understand the law, we need to define our terms, so let’s start there. In 1959, when Washington law first provided a legal definition for pedestrian it was “any person afoot.” I don’t know about you, but when I hear “afoot” I think of the line from the greatest time travel movie of all time, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, when Ted says, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K.” Anyway, back then the legal definition of pedestrian was similar to the one in the dictionary: a person going on foot.
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