“I protested the service’s inefficiency and unreliability in true millennial fashion: I complained to family, friends, and social media followers, wrote blog posts, and started Change.org petitions, generally filing formal complaints when something especially ridiculous happened…Two years ago, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I returned home and increased my advocacy for passengers using the service” (Wilson 207). “

The Assignment

Inquiry, the process of asking questions, involves reading as well as writing, as writing and reading are interconnected and interrelated processes. The reading you are assigned to do in this course includes both texts about as well as texts about our course theme of disability. 

Reading responses are meant to help you make sense of the readings you have completed and think more broadly about the issues, topics, and questions the readings discuss. The reading responses should respond fully, carefully, and thoughtfully to the prompt below; they are not meant to summarize the reading and should include specific references to the essay in the form of quotes, paraphrases, or summaries.

The essay “On NYC’s Paratransit, Fighting for Safety, Respect, and Human 

Dignity” by Britney Wilson is one of many essays included in the anthology Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century edited by Alice Wong. In this piece, Wilson profiles Access-a-Ride, New York’s 

door-to-door public transit service for those with mobility issues. Using a 

combination of primary research in the form of observations and 

secondary background information on Access-a-Ride, Wilson is able to 

argue for the inefficiency and unreliability of the service.  

For this reading response, you should focus on how this essay incorporates Wilson’s observations of Access-a-Ride and how these observations support the overall argument that the service is unreliable, inefficient, inflexible, and unpredictable. Cite examples from the essay as evidence (you do not need a works cited page; just the page number is fine). Below, you will find some questions to think about as you write. You’re not expected to answer all of these questions; they are here to help inspire you as you think about our assigned reading: