A health care professional must certify that an applicant meets standards for disability, which can include the inability to walk 200 feet without resting, needing a cane, crutch or other assistance to walk, or use of portable oxygen.
Some consider the application process too lax.
“It is the general feeling of council members that it is too easy to get one of those placards,” said Linda Oda, the governor-appointed chairperson of the Governor’s Council on People with Disabilities.
“If you’ve just done battle to get one, you may not feel like that, but there are a lot of doctors that hand them out like candy. And that’s where the problem comes in … the parking spaces are at a premium, and (the placard) is not being used as it’s intended to be.”
Officials have noted drivers parking in disabled spaces without placards, using placards of living or deceased family members or even using their issued placards to park in disabled spaces when traveling to activities such as aerobics, which might signal a diminished need to use the spaces.
Dr. Jill Manahan, who practices internal medicine, says that the process to issue a handicapped placard is “definitely subjective.”
“All a physician needs to do is write a prescription, and really, that’s all that’s involved,” Manahan said. “Most of the time you see it done through orthopedists, but other people may have chronic pain or extreme obesity. There’s no set-in-stone criteria.”
Fines for inappropriate disabled space parking, which range from $250 to $500, usually are posted next to the spaces. Some say those reminders aren’t enough to discourage wrongdoing. The Americans with Disabilities Act designates the number of necessary disabled spaces based on the size of a parking lot, but the growing number of placards has tested availability.
However, experts caution residents not to assume a placard is being misused when seeing a driver without an obvious handicap.
“There may be people with a heart issue,” said Kathy McMahon-Klosterman, a Miami University professor who has worked in special education. “Maybe they’ve only got so many steps in them … there are a lot of people with traumatic brain disorders who have issues. They themselves cannot drive, and they have been given a placard to help with their issues.
“The more I become involved in the disabled community, the more I realize we shouldn’t be judging anybody else, because you just don’t know.”
Misusing privileges
Particularly near the holidays, stores and shopping malls face increased demand for — and abuse or misuse of — parking spaces for the disabled. Some police departments have made enforcement a priority, which the Governors Council on People with Disabilities recognized recently with the implementation of the Accessible Parking Enforcement Award.
The first department to win the award was the Miami Twp. Police Department. The council noted that the department created an enforcement plan in 2007 and educated officers on signs of misuse, particularly during holiday periods. However, officials have noted that enforcement can be difficult because a placard is assigned to a person and not a vehicle, so it can be impossible to know whether a placard inside a parked car is being misused without identifying the driver or passengers.
“It seems very often there are fewer parking spaces than are called for under the Americans with Disabilities Act,” McMahon-Klosterman said. “There is very little follow-through if a complaint is issued.”
The Bureau of Motor Vehicles notes on its two-page application for disabled placards that using a placard for a vehicle not operated by or transporting the authorized person is a misdemeanor punishable by a fine between $250 and $500.
Providing a false prescription to obtain a placard can bring a punishment of six months of incarceration or a fine of up to $1,000.
Still, abuses occur, experts said.
“Those people that need it should be held accountable to use it when (the disabled person) is in the vehicle,” Oda said. “How many people do we know who have a person with a disability in their family but they take the placard with them when the family member is at home?”
Meeting demand
At Hithergreen Center, a senior center in Washington Twp., 10 of the parking lot’s 120 spaces are reserved for disabled parking. Executive director Cynthia Fraley likes to remind the center’s users that possession of a placard doesn’t necessarily mean they must use it.
“If someone’s going to an aerobics class, someone else’s need (for a spot) might be more than theirs,” Fraley said.
According to the Americans with Disabilities Act, one out of every 25 parking spots must be accessible to the handicapped, and one of every eight of these handicapped parking spaces has to be van accessible. If there are 500 to 1,000 parking spaces, 2 percent of them must be handicapped accessible. For parking lots with more than 1,000 spaces, 1 of every 100 spaces must be accessible.
Fraley said there is a higher demand than the available disabled spaces at Hithergreen, but sometimes parking lots have few options to expand. The disabled parking is meant to make facilities more easily accessible for those holding placards, but sometimes spaces can’t be increased because of the parking lot’s layout.
“We could make all 120 spaces (disabled spaces),” she said, “but that wouldn’t make it more convenient.”
At large facilities such as college campuses, officials try to make disabled parking as available as possible. Rob Kretzer, director of parking and transportation at Wright State, said disabled parking needs can change by term or year depending on where classes are taken, but officials also try to keep constant availability near entrances to the school’s tunnel system.
When misuses are suspected, the campus police department is called, but abuses can also be difficult to determine.
“It’s not a frequent thing,” Kretzer said, “but I’m sure it happens more than we’d like.”
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