New Pain for the Handicapped

For most Americans, the gasoline shortage is a frustrating inconvenience; for the physically handicapped, it is a direct threat to health and the ability to earn a living. People in wheelchairs or on crutches--those who have lost the use of their limbs--often cannot get on a bus or a train. They are utterly dependent on the auto to reach jobs, schools or therapists' offices. Some drive their own specially equipped cars, some rely on private transportation services that ferry them about, some are chauffeured by nonhandicapped members of their families.

Generally, the handicapped and those who drive them get no special consideration under state and local gas-rationing plans. They must wait in line like anyone else--a physical impossibility for some of the disabled who, because of fatigue and skin breakdowns, cannot sit in line for an hour or more--and buy gas only on odd-or even-numbered days, according to their license plate numbers. Nor can gas-station owners save fuel to sell to their handicapped customers; to do so is forbidden by a Federal Energy Office regulation that bans favoritism to regular customers, handicapped or not.

Many of the handicapped, for whom a car is a pair of legs, complain that under those conditions they cannot buy enough gas to get around. Garrett Oppenheim, whose legs are crippled, figures that he can continue to drive 20 miles from his home in Rockland County, N.Y., to his job as an editor for Medical Economics magazine in Oradell, N.J., but otherwise, if the shortage continues, "I'd be stranded. No shopping, no errands, no visits." He finds that a threat not only to his mobility but to his self-respect. "After I got a hand-controlled car," he says, "people were honking at me instead of making way for me on the street. It puts me in a competitive situation with everyone else, and to have it threatened is a dreadful feeling."

Special Stickers. Many of the handicapped are asking that they and the people who drive them be given special windshield stickers that would enable them to go to the head of gas lines, buy fuel on any day and fill their tanks even if the gas station had, say, a $5 limit. So far, most state authorities have paid little attention. Susan Purdy, wife of a polio victim who works as a computer programmer and lives in Roxbury, Conn., recently called the state rehabilitation department to ask about special consideration in buying gasoline. "They said they hadn't thought about the problem," she reports.

At present, the handicapped would fare no better if the Federal Energy Office orders nationwide gas rationing under its current standby rationing plan. All drivers living in the New York area, for example, would get 33 to 40 gal. per month, though the Paralyzed Veterans of America Inc. figures that on the average, the handicapped need 100 gal. Disabled drivers require more gas because they are dependent on their cars for traveling even the shortest distances. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare and the President's Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, however, are working with the FEO to change its plans. At the local level, some of the handicapped are organizing to protest. At a rally in New York last week, several groups threatened to stage traffic-blocking demonstrations if they are not given special consideration under that state's rationing plan.

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