“It’s a basic human right to enter a place like anybody else,” says Sasha Blair-Goldensohn. This simple ideal can seem maddeningly out of reach for wheelchair users in America’s largest and most expensive metropolis. But for Blair-Goldensohn, a 48-year-old software engineer and United Spinal member from New York City, it’s the driving force of his life.
In 2009, Blair-Goldensohn lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and used the subway on the daily commute to his job at Google’s Chelsea office. With a doctorate based in artificial intelligence and natural language processing from Columbia University, Blair-Goldensohn was working in AI when it was still a behind-the-scenes tool.
“The first project that I worked on when I came here was about how Maps handles reviews,” he says. “A restaurant might have 3,000 reviews and want to be able to throw all of them into the AI blender and have it pop out a summary: ‘People say this place has great soup dumplings, really long lines and it gets super crowded.’”
Though his work at Google touched on its Maps technology, he wasn’t thinking much about the actual route-finding features — how people get from A to B. That changed one morning while he was walking through Central Park to catch the subway and a 100-pound tree limb fell on him. The limb fractured his skull and he sustained a T5 spinal cord injury.
Recovery and rehab was lengthy and full of setbacks, but after a year and a half he was ready to return to work. His experience was eye-opening. Blair-Goldensohn’s Manhattan commute was hampered by a Metropolitan Transportation Authority system that, more than 30 years after passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, still lacked wheelchair access in nearly 75% of commuter train stations.
Subway elevators were frequently broken down, further limiting mobility and inclusion. “You are either stuck on the inside or the outside,” he says. “In one situation, at least you are on the surface, but you realize there’s no way home because the elevator is shut down for who knows how long. In the other situation, you are several flights of stairs down and you have to rely on strangers to carry you out.”
Source: New Mobility
