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2NC Transportation Key

Lack of mobility lies at the heart of exclusion – transportation for the disabled is key


Mattson, Hough, and Abeson, 2010 (Jeremy, Jill, Alan, Faculty at North Dakota State University, “Assessing Existing and Needed Community Transportation for People with Disabilities in North Dakota”, Small Urban & Rural Transit Center, Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, North Dakota State University, November)
Mobility is fundamental for people to live full and satisfying lives in their communities. With community mobility, people have opportunities for employment, civic involvement, health care, shopping, socialization, and participation in community activities. Without it, people may experience isolation and depression (Hughes, Nosek, and Robinson-Whelen 2007; Marottoli et al. 1997). For adults with disabilities, access to community transportation is often limited or non-existent. While the need for improving this situation is increasingly being recognized, moving forward requires current and accurate descriptive information about transportation services used and needed. A survey by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics in 2002 showed that almost 15 million people in the United States have difficulties getting the transportation they need, and of these, 6 million are people with disabilities (U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics 2003). The survey also showed that more than 3.5 million people in the country never leave their homes, more than half of whom are people with disabilities. Lack of transportation was a major contributing factor, as about 560,000 people with disabilities were found to never leave home because of transportation difficulties. The problem could become more severe as the population ages. Estimates show that the percentage of the population age 65 or older in North Dakota will increase from 15% in 2005 to 23% by 2020, which would be nearly 150,000 people (Rathge 2007). Although disability is not an inevitable consequence of aging, estimates from the Census show that disability rates increase significantly with age. According to the 2006 American Community Survey (U.S. Census Bureau 2006), 14.1% of the non-institutionalized population in North Dakota age 5 or older has a disability, just below the national average of 15.1%. For people age 65 to 74 in the state, 28.3% have a disability, and more than half of the people in the state (51.5%) age 75 or older are found to have a disability. People with disabilities clearly represent a sizable segment of the population. For those of working age, disabilities can become a barrier to gaining employment. Approximately one in ten people age 21 to 64 in the state has a disability. Among this working age population, the percentage of people employed is much lower for those with disabilities. For example, among people age 35 to 64 in the state, 86% of those with no disability are employed, compared with just 50% of those with a disability. Poor access to transportation could be one factor contributing to this lower rate of employment. A number of studies and surveys both in North Dakota and nationwide have shown that people with disabilities have experienced problems with transportation. A study published by the Small Urban & Rural Transit Center (SURTC) in 2003 (Hegland and Hough 2003) surveyed people with disabilities in the state regarding their transportation needs and found that many of the respondents used transit; more would use it if it were available to them, and many reported problems with transportation. An update to this previous study is warranted because the scope of that survey was somewhat limited, and conditions may have changed, for better or worse, during the years since that survey was conducted. A new study could address areas not covered in the previous survey, determine if there has been any progress in addressing the transportation needs of people with disabilities, and provide an instrument that can be used for future research either to track progress or collect similar information in other communities. Additionally, the results of the study might enable transportation planners and providers, as well as local and state policy makers, to undertake actions to address the deficiencies documented by this effort. The objectives for this study, therefore, are to 1) obtain a current and accurate description of existing and needed community transportation for adults with disabilities in North Dakota, 2) establish a methodology for obtaining this information that can be used over time to assess progress in providing transportation for adults with disabilities in North Dakota, and 3) create a data collection instrument that can be used by communities and states beyond North Dakota for collecting similar information.

2NC Value to Life Impact

The isolation and concealment of disabled bodies deems them worthless and strips them of all human value


Snyder and Mitchell, 2001 (Sharon, Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, David, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “Re-engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment”, Public Culture, Vol. 13 No. 3, Fall, Project Muse)
We begin with Byron’s The Deformed Transformed as an allegory for the efforts of U.S. disability studies first to disengage from, and then to re-engage with, disabled bodies. In the drama, rejection of the apparently visceral life of disability for the evidently social ideal of a “classical” and “able” body encapsulates the double bind that confronts those who inhabit disabled bodies: one must either endure the cultural slander heaped upon bodily difference or seek to evade the object of derision. Such erasures of disabled people have historically been achieved through such cultural “solutions” as institutionalization, isolation, genocide, cure, concealment, segregation, exile, quarantine, and prosthetic masking, among others. As a theatrical effort to destigmatize the disabled body, Byron’s play—much like research in disability studies over the past twenty years—aims to debunk the fictions of desirability that invest the “able” body. In critiquing the presumed desirability invested in able bodies, disability studies has sought to destigmatize disabled bodies only by default. In the mid-1990s, U.S. disability studies returned to encounter the sloughed-off disabled body after the “perfectible,” able body had been rethought as a matter of epistemology, as opposed to biology. We argue that disability studies has strategically neglected the question of the experience of disabled embodiment in order to disassociate disability from its mooring in medical cultures and institutions. Although recently disability criticism has been calling for a return to a phenomenology of the disabled body,3 this return has been slow in coming. Like feminized, raced, and queered bodies, the disabled body became situated in definitive contrast to the articulation of what amounted to a hegemonic aesthetic premised on biology. Within this cultural belief system, the “normal” body provided the baseline for determinations of desirability and human value.


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