Hope your not upset with me and my story...I didn't mean to offend anyone. Hope I'm not one of the 'boob's" you refer to??
I just meant to educate people and if I sounded a little upset or harsh, well I've been on the receiving end of comments and I was up last night with storms in our area, so I did not get a good night of sleep.
I can explain a little more about the buses.
Most (but not all) of the buses are equipped to transport wheelchairs. Sometimes a bus that does have a lift or ramp has problems (like the lift doesn't work or the tiedown belts for the wheelchair are missing). Each bus can hold a maximum of 2 wheelchairs or ecvs (electric scooters). Wheelchairs and/or ecvs need to be loaded from the back door using the lift or ramp and the driver must usually know that there is a wheelchair to load before he/she stops the bus in order to line everything up correctly. People with wheelchairs or ecvs are told to go out in the open (about where the back door of the bus will be) in order to have the driver see them. The driver needs to operate the lift and usually, they close the front door of the bus so that no one is coming onto the bus while the lift is being operated. Those WDW rental wheelcahirs weigh about 50 pounds (empty), so they don't want anyone trying to carry it up the back steps. My DD's manual wheelchair weighs about 40 pounds and it's a lightweight one. Since she can't walk, she can't get out of her wheelchair for boarding, but since the wheelchair has to go up the lift anyway, it doesn't matter whether the person is sitting in it or not - the lift will still be used.
One seat across from the back door of the bus is folded up to make a place for the wheelchair. If the driver allowed everyone else to load onto the bus first, whoever was in that seat would need to move when the wheelchair was boarded. Also, the more people there are on the bus, the harder it is to manouver the wheelchair into place (and it will take longer to load) the wheelchair on. Then the wheelchair is actually tied down to the floor with straps to keep it from moving/rolling on the bus.
When we first started riding the WDW buses, they did have the person in the wheelchair and one member of their party out of line and the rest of their party was to wait in the line and tell the bus driver that there was a wheelchair to board. That took a lot longer to load the wheelchair because of all the people. Sometimes, once I got to the front, we couldn't ride because the lift or straps were not in working order, so we waited for the next bus. Although things usually work out, we have already waited over an hour for the bus at DD because the 3 buses that came in that time period had 1) already picked up 2 wheelchairs, 2) the straps were missing for the tiedowns and 3) one of the buses didn't have a lift. The dispatcher finally sent another bus just for us.
For our party, we usually only sit if there are still seats left when the bus has been fully loaded. And we have heard comments of the "why do they waste 2 seats on having a wheelchair on. Those people shouldn't be allowed to ride the bus" type. It's not a pleasant bus ride when you know people are looking at you and thinking things like that.
On our last trip, we waited off to the side sitting on benches at MK since there were people already waiting for the bus when we got to the stop. I noticed who was at the end of the line when we arrived and when we saw that they would get on the bus, we went over. I still heard some grumbling about us having "gone to the front of the line", but we had waited as long as everyone else - just not where they noticed us.
). i am physically able to walk down stairs, but i am slow and i'd rather take an elevator or escalator where available.
