Travellers World

Travelling with a wheelchair — the good, the bad and the not-a-chance

Tag: driving

  • Blue badge parking: what to check before you set off

    A blue badge does not get you a parking space. It gets you the right to a parking space, which is a different thing entirely on a wet Saturday in a seaside town.

    What the badge actually does

    The badge belongs to the person, not the car, so it travels with you into a taxi or a friend’s vehicle. Since 2019 the scheme in England has also covered hidden disabilities, which was a long overdue change. Councils charge different amounts — up to £10 in England, free in Wales, up to £20 in Scotland — and it runs for three years.

    The rules on where you can park vary by council, and they vary a lot in central London, where several boroughs run their own schemes and the standard badge concessions do not apply. Check the specific borough before you drive in. We have learned that one the expensive way.

    What to check before you set off

    • How many accessible bays are there? “We have disabled parking” can mean twelve bays or one.
    • Are they bookable? Some attractions will reserve one. Always worth the phone call.
    • What is the surface? A gravel or cobbled car park is effectively inaccessible however wide the bay is.
    • Is the bay wide enough for a side transfer or a rear ramp? If you use a rear-loading vehicle you need space behind, which a standard hatched bay does not always give you.
    • Height barriers. The great enemy of the adapted van. Multi-storeys and supermarket car parks are full of them, usually at 2.0 or 2.1 metres.
    • How far is the bay from the entrance, and what is between them? A bay two hundred metres away across a slope is not really an accessible bay.

    Two things worth carrying

    A parking clock, the blue plastic dial that some councils require alongside the badge on single yellow lines. And the badge itself displayed clock-face up, expiry visible — a badge that has slid face-down on the dashboard is a ticket, and appealing it is a tedious afternoon.

    If the bays are all taken by people without badges

    In a private car park — supermarket, retail park, hospital — it is worth telling the staff, because enforcement there is entirely down to the operator and they often do not realise how bad it has got. On a public road it is a council matter. Neither will help you today, which is why we always have a plan B car park before we leave the house.

    Your turn: if you have experiences of your own — the places that got it right, and the ones that got it badly wrong — tell us in the comments below. Every report helps the next traveller.

  • Motorway services: the stop is part of the journey

    Motorway services are the part of the journey nobody writes about, which is odd, because on a long drive you will spend more time in them than anywhere except the car. For us a services stop is not a pause in the trip. It is one of the legs of it, and it can go wrong in all the usual ways.

    The good news first

    Services are actually one of the more reliably accessible environments in Britain. They are modern, single-level, automatic-doored, and legally obliged to be open to everyone 24 hours a day. Blue badge parking is free (the general two-hour free rule applies to everyone, but badge bays sit closest to the door), and nearly every major services has an accessible toilet. A large and growing number now have a Changing Places facility too — the big room with the hoist and bench — and that is worth planning around.

    Plan the stops like you plan the route

    Our rule: on any drive over two hours, we choose the stop before we leave, rather than taking whichever services appears when someone needs it. Because:

    • The Changing Places map tells you which services have one. If you need it, that decides the stop, full stop.
    • Services vary wildly in distance-from-car-to-door. Some have badge bays right at the entrance; some have them across a lane of moving traffic.
    • The RADAR key comes with us, because accessible toilets at services are sometimes on the key scheme — and occasionally “closed for cleaning” at exactly the wrong moment, at which point the staff can open the second one they usually have.
    • Fuel matters too: some forecourts will send someone out to help you fill up if you can’t get out — there are apps and horn signals for this — but it depends on staffing, so the reliable move is to fuel where a second person can jump out.

    The details that separate good from bad

    • Counter heights. Most food units are fine; ordering screens set high or card readers bolted at standing height are the modern nuisance. Staff will always come round, but you have to catch someone’s eye first.
    • Seating. Fixed benches bolted to fixed tables are everywhere in services, and they are exactly the restaurant booth problem again. Look for the loose chairs; there are always some.
    • The 2.0m height barrier on the “premium” parking nearest the door at some sites. The badge bays are fine, but if they are full, the overflow may not be, if you drive anything tall.

    None of this is difficult. All of it is the difference between a ten-minute stop and a forty-minute one, and on a long travel day those thirty minutes are the margin between arriving fine and arriving done in.