A park in Sijhih City (汐止), Taipei County, drew criticism from activists recently because it bans wheelchairs.
Under the pseudonym Zuo Peng (左芃), the mother of a girl who depends on a wheelchair posted an article on her blog at the end of last month saying her daughter was blocked from entering the Sijhih Sports Park because she was in a wheelchair.
“One negative thing about this park that was built for the public is that it puts dogs and wheels in the same category. Dogs and anything with wheels — wheelchair, cart, buggy, bicycle, scooter or tricycle — are all prohibited from entering” as a sign outside the park entrance states, Zuo wrote.
“This is a typical case of discrimination and lack of awareness about people with disabilities,” she said, adding that while most people can leave their wheels outside the park, only people on wheelchairs are completely excluded.
Zuo said that when she protested to park administrators, they said it would look bad if there were wheelchairs in the park and suggested the complaint should be directed to the park’s designers.
Zuo said she and her daughter “left the place feeling discriminated against and humiliated.”
However, more humiliation came when she filed a complaint with the county government.
The county’s Public Works Bureau said the rule followed a set of Sijhih regulations on the management of parks and public spaces. It went on to say that the park was built to be “used by the regular public for sports purposes, hence the entries of pets and physically challenged individuals are not recommended, in order to ensure the safety of the regular public and the physically challenged.”
Zuo said the reply upset her.
“What kind of logic is it to say that people on wheelchairs would threaten the safety of ‘the regular public’ so the ‘regular public’ may stay in the park, while people on wheelchairs and pets should be kept out?” Zuo said. “I wonder what these officials, park designers and public servants have in mind when they think of people on wheelchairs? If this isn’t discrimination, what is it?”
Citing clauses in the Act for Protecting the Interests of the Physically and Mentally Disabled (身心障礙者權益保障法), which stipulates that people with disabilities should have equal rights using facilities in public places, Organizations for the Disabled secretary-general Wang Yu-ling (王幼玲) said the county and city governments were violating the law and treating people with disabilities as second-class citizens.
“They should apologize and revise the park regulations,” Wang said.
County Public Works Bureau official Hsieh Wen-huang (謝文徨) said they replied according to regulation and had no intention to humiliate or to discriminate, and added the bureau would apologize to Zuo.
Sijhih City official Chiang Chang-liu (江長流) said the rule was made to protect the pavement on the tracks and promised to revise the wording of the sign to avoid misunderstandings in the future.
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