Dancing Spirals

frequently when i’m out and about with someone walking, they can’t anticipate what path i will take and therefore they’re in my way pretty frequently. this is fine! i can politely ask them to step to the side. but it makes me think about how little non-wheelchair users understand the way wheelchair users move. as someone who used to walk everywhere, it was an adjustment period for me to figure out how to navigate the world in a chair. here are some things that didn’t occur to me so that you don’t cut off your friend right as they’re building momentum to go up a ramp 😆

for context, i use an active manual chair. the world is very different in a power chair. even among active manual chair users, there is a huge diversity in physicality and strategies for getting around. this is a general guide that i think will apply to most manual wheelchair users. i’m starting super basic and getting more complicated as i go.

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1. manual wheelchairs are a momentum game. it is very easy to maintain speed and direction. but speeding up, slowing down, or turning, is hard. one thing this affects is if we’re on a wavy sidewalk or other twisty-turny walkway, that is a pain in the ass and i am taking as straight a path as i can.

2. wheelchair users also have to pay attention to the slope and condition of the pavement, so our path somewhere will be different than yours, even if we’re taking the same route to the same place. for example, i usually have to go down slopes straight, not diagonally, to avoid tipping over sideways. one area this affects is crosswalks. many intersections have one curb cut for both roads you could cross, which means i will go down curb cuts to a crosswalk as if i am aiming for the middle of the intersection.

your path in orange, mine in blue. to you it seems indirect, but to me it’s the path of least resistance.

i also will be building speed in the second half of the crosswalk. this is a much easier way to tackle a ramp. if i approach with momentum, i won’t have to drag myself up the slope once i get to it.

3. building momentum and maintaining it is only half of the job. the other half is stopping. manual wheelchairs cannot stop on a dime if they’re moving with any kind of speed. if i tried to stop immediately when going downhill, i would fly out of the chair. so don’t walk right into the path of a wheelchair in motion and then stop! i will have to turn to the side very quickly and hope i don’t tip. i can’t tell you how often parents pushing strollers will stop their stroller directly in my path and then get offended when i am alarmed and turn sharply to avoid hitting their child. from their perspective, i was being careless and going “too fast.” in reality, normal walking speed takes a few feet to slow down from and stop.

4. in terms of slope. see this street in san francisco?

i can’t go down this street, it’s way too steep. i would give myself friction burns on my palms trying to control my speed. if i was in a situation where there was no avoiding this street, like in an emergency, i would be breaking my straight-slope rule and zig-zagging in the middle of the road.

this would require several zig-zags back and forth, more than the four that i drew. i also could not go up this road other than with this method. up or down, i risk tipping over sideways if i’m not careful.

4. in a similar vein, consider terrain. slopes with grass or carpet take huge amounts of energy to get up. this grassy hill isn’t insurmountable, but it would take me like thirty minutes to get up there. honestly i would probably go backwards, because it’s easier to pull yourself up a slope than push yourself.

other types of terrain can be completely immobilizing, though. this decorative gravel pathway is beautiful, and inaccessible to me. my casters (front wheels) simply will not go through that.

5. in terms of walkways and obstacles. if there’s a deep gap in the pavement lined up the way i’m going, and it’s, say, an inch wide, that is an obstacle for me. my casters are one inch wide, and my back wheels are an inch and a half. i’ll get stuck in it like a train on a track.

i have to straddle this, even if it means being too close to the middle of the sidewalk and preventing us from walking side by side.

similarly, if a crack is greater than an inch high, i’m gonna wheelie over it. at two inches, i have to. a wheelie may require a change in speed, either faster or slower depending on the person.

i have 4 inch casters, so a lip as little as 2 inches will stop me in my tracks. a lip as little as one inch, hit with any speed, can knock my casters out of square. casters can get knocked out of alignment pretty easily depending on the chair. i’d rather not have to pull out an allen wrench and a level, so i’m gonna wheelie.

this happened when i hit about a 1.5” lip on a pavement crack when i was going downhill at maybe 3mph.

6. putting it all together. see how diagonal this crack is?

this is another situation where i have to go straight relative to the slope. because that crack is wide, it will probably also require a wheelie. if i tried to approach that straight relative to the sidewalk, my left caster would get up the slope, i’d wheelie, then my right caster would land in the crack. i have to go this way.

(also lol at the trash can blocking the curb cut)

it is necessary instead to sit down and kinda try and quiet that voice, and then start with considering my physical needs, kinda mentally run through the maslow's pyramid from bottom to top as if I'm dealing with a little kid throwing a tantrum. like, did we sleep last night? have we had lunch? am I lonely? should I call my aunt? do I want to finish the book I've been reading? do I want to boil chicken bones today? what's bothering me? I'll then try out a couple of things that seem likely and while they may not be The Thing it's useful to build momentum anyways.

but like, if I give it space, the answer will float upwards into view and it's usually something I've been putting off for a long-ass time.

and it'll sound So Stupid to the Talking Mind, who has important tasks that it's trying to get done, but we're going to tell that voice that the kitchen will wait while we take down the Christmas tree, fold the laundry that's been in the basket for a week, sketch the idea, call my aunt, whatever it is, and inevitably the Linchpin Task will take about half an hour, and once it's done I can feel the weight lifted off my shoulders.

Linchpin Tasks are sometimes that it's time to deal with The Emotions At The Bottom Of The Pile, which is when a pile of stuff builds up to cover whatever is at the bottom being emotionally fraught. (letters, the shirt I wore the day my grandpa died, y'know, The Emotions)

I've gotten better at identifying when those piles are starting to accrete and dealing with them before they get bad, but like, you gotta be able to identify the pile of stuff your eyeballs keep slipping off because it feels too emotionally difficult to deal with right now, and like, learning to ignore the part of the mind that wants to assign task priority levels is a counter-intuitive way to get things done.

Because the way I was taught it, the Trolley Problem isn't a one-and-done thing in isolation - its classic form is there to set up the variations and test where your values change.

The classic form is: a runaway trolley is careening down the tracks. The brakes are broken, it can't be stopped. In its path, five people are tied to the tracks, and if it's left to its own devices, the trolley will run over them and kill them. BUT you have the option to pull a lever and send the trolley down a different track. On that track, one person is tied to the tracks. As it stands Right Now, if you do nothing, the five people will die, and the one person will live. But you can pull the lever and switch the trolley's track so that the one person will die, and the five will live. The trolley is approaching and you don't have time to untie anyone from the tracks. Would you pull the lever?

In its base form, the question is fairly simple, and it's about if the capacity to intervene makes you morally obligated to intervene, and if doing nothing and letting more people die is better or worse than personally intervening to make it so that fewer people die, but one person will die who without your intervention would otherwise have lived.

But that's even one iteration of the problem, because most people say yes - saving five people and sacrificing one is, overall, better than saving one person and sacrificing five.

And the real value of the Trolley Problem comes after you've said, yes, I'd pull the lever.

You've established that you believe intervening to save five people even if that means sacrificing one person is the more morally correct option. Then the question-asker hits you with,

... what if the five people were strangers, and the one person was your mom/your spouse/your sister/your best friend? Would you pull the lever then?

... what if the five people were adults, and the one was a child? Would you pull the lever then?

... what if the five people were convicted felons, and the one was not? Would you pull the lever then?

... what if the five people were disabled, and the one person was an Olympic athlete? Would you pull the lever then?

... what if instead of one person, it was four people? Would you pull the lever then?

... what if instead of five people, it was a critically endangered bird, whose death might doom its species to extinction? Would you pull the lever then?

The one that sticks in my head is, let's go back to the baseline version - a trolley is careening out of control towards five people, and you can intervene to shift it to the track where it will kill one person. Did you say yes to that?

Now imagine there are five terminally ill people who need a heart transplant, a liver transplant, a lung transplant, and two kidney transplants, or they'll die. Meanwhile, there is a perfectly healthy adult in front of you with fully functional organs that are a perfect match for these five people. Would you kill that healthy adult and distribute their organs to the five sick people, saving their lives?

If you said no to that, but yes to pulling the trolley lever... why? The logic is the same: kill one person who would otherwise have lived, in order to save five people who would otherwise have died. But it feels different, doesn't it? Why?

That's what the Trolley Problem is for. It's a deliberately contrived ethical thought experiment to draw out our values, our feelings, and how we apply our values about people's lives when we make decisions - and maybe make us face the realization that we have some gut feelings about the value of some lives over others, and make us ask ourselves why we feel that way.

It's applied to hospital triage situations about who to treat first, and to decisions when programming self-driving cars in a crash scenario of whether to prioritize the safety of a pedestrian or the driver.

And it exists so that once you realize the way you're thinking about this, you then have to turn the question to the trade-offs we actually make in society.

... what if instead of five people, it was seven million people, and on the other track, instead of one person, it was The Economy?

... what if instead of five people, it was 7,500 people, and on the other track, instead of one person, it's letting car companies do what they want forever?

... what if instead of five people, it was 1,000 people, and on the other track, instead of one person, it was police budgets and police immunity?

... what if instead of five people, it was a ground invasion of Japan, and on the other track, instead of one person, it was 140,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

... what if instead of five people, it was 251 hostages, and on the other track, instead of one person, it was the entire population of Gaza?