There are a lot of things I hadn’t anticipated before becoming disabled; I hadn’t expected healthcare and education to be so inaccessible, nor had I counted on how relationships with those around me would be impacted. I certainly wasn’t prepared for how much time I would spend waiting.

Disabled people are made to wait for a lot of things. We must wait for assistance to board trains and planes. We must wait for accessible taxis to become available, even when pre-booked. Should the wheelchair space on a bus be occupied, many of us must wait for the next bus. We must wait to access limited resources such as accessible bathrooms, changing rooms and lifts. We must wait for changing rooms to be cleared when they are being used as stockrooms. We must wait in long phone queues for accessible tickets to shows. We must wait for venues to unlock accessible entrances and put the ramp out. We must wait for pathways to be unblocked. We must wait for vehicles parked over crossings and on pavements to move. We often have to wait weeks or even months for equipment to be delivered or repaired.

Some of this waiting is unavoidable on an individual level (although in a society that took disability into consideration it would be almost entirely avoidable), as it is the consequence of accessible resources being made artificially scarce by manufacturers and designers. However, there are plenty of things on that list that are completely avoidable, such as pavement parking, needing to unlock accessible routes, or removing obstructions.

All of these delays add up to a significant proportion of time, which is why disabled people get irate about them, especially the unnecessary ones. It might be 30 seconds for you to move your vehicle, but for us it’s quite possibly the fourth or fifth time we’ve encountered it in that single trip. These delays are also impactful; contrary to popular opinion disabled people still have places to be, and setting off extra early isn’t always feasible. Frankly, many disabled people simply avoid going out where possible because they don’t have the energy to deal with it, myself included.

To prove just how bad this problem is, I decided to do an experiment; I would record how much of my time is wasted on one trip out.

The rules:

• I only timed delays that impacted me specifically as a disabled person, and not non-disabled people i.e. when someone gave up waiting for the lift and took the stairs, or while no one was waiting for the standard bathrooms while I had to wait.
• I only set the timer going once my wheelchair had come to a full stop, and the timer was stopped as soon as I set off again.
• If the day was worse than average, I would take some time off the final result. If the day was better than average, I would add some time to the final result.
• I would multiply the final result by 3 to reflect the average number of trips out I made in a week. I would then multiply this by 52 to show it’s impact across 1 year, then by 10 for the total impact over my time as a wheelchair user.

Here’s how I got on.

The results:

During one trip out, I waited;

• 17 seconds for a taxi to move from the crossing it was blocking.
• 1 minute 33 seconds at a crossing waiting for the green light, after someone pulled across the crossing the first time, preventing me from crossing.
• 1 minute 2 seconds to detour around a blocked path.
• 11 minutes 18 seconds for a bus as the first was alteady occupied by another wheelchair user.
• 5 seconds for someone to move their bags from the wheelchair space once I got on a bus.
• 57 seconds for a lift after someone gave up and walked up the stairs.
• 2 minutes 58 seconds to use the accessible bathroom, where there was no queue for the standard toilets.
• 34 seconds to use the accessible bathroom.
• 4 minutes 29 seconds to use the accessible bathroom.
• 32 seconds for the lift.
• 14 seconds to push some boxes to one side so I could pass.

The weather that afternoon was nice so I decided not to take the bus.

• 37 seconds for a pavement parker to move.
• 1 minute 7 seconds seconds for a green light, after the crossing was blocked the first time.
• 19 seconds for a pavement parker to move.
• 23 seconds for a pavement parker to move.
• 1 minute 27 seconds for the accessible till to be opened (I nipped in for sundries as I was already out).
• 1 minute 13 seconds for a detour around a blocked passage.
• 14 seconds for a pavement parker to move.

All told, this adds up to a whopping 1,759 seconds, or approximately 29 minutes 19 seconds. This was a slightly worse than usual trip so I took 5 minutes off the total to give a final average of 24 minutes delay per outing.

Per week, this adds up to 1 hour 12 minutes.

Per year, this adds up to 62 hours and 24 minutes waiting, or 2 and a half days.

Over my decade of wheelchair use, this adds up to 624 hours, or 26 days. In other words, I have spent almost four weeks of my life waiting for no other reason than that I am disabled. Even I was surprised by how much it added up to.

Now, as someone who has studied and works in the sciences, I know that my little experiment was far from scientific. I didn’t repeat the experiment over multiple outings because it’s quite impractical (and I got a few odd looks). Since I was the only subject, I cannot say for certain how different locations and disabilities impact the waiting times. I only did the experiment on one day of the year, so how weather conditions and festivities impact the waiting times are not described. However, I didn’t do this to be published in the New England Journal of Medicine; I did it to make a point.

When a disabled person is visibly impatient or irate at having been made to wait unnecessarily, it is not because we are unreasonable or just grumpy. It is because, even as we ourselves are undervalued by society, so is our time.

How long must we wait to stop waiting?