NEW ORLEANS — A New Orleans family won an important preliminary victory last week in a federal disability discrimination lawsuit against the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority.
U.S. District Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown issued a temporary injunction, ordering the RTA to let 8-year-old Oscar Edmunds get on and off wheelchair-accessible streetcars at 66 of 114 stops along the historic St. Charles Avenue line, rather than being limited to only the six inbound and six outbound stops designated as ADA accessible.
And Monday, after a 20-minute delay while a supervisor came out to direct the driver to let them on, Oscar and his family boarded the streetcar at Sycamore and Carrollton, the same stop where they were refused service in April 2023.
An RTA spokesman issued a statement Monday saying: "We are currently working to implement policies, procedures and training to ensure that the adherence to this ruling is as safe and practical as possible, given the conditions."
Oscar’s father, Chris, an attorney who specializes in the Americans with Disabilities Act, filed the lawsuit against the RTA last July, after Oscar was refused service at a stop near the playground because it wasn’t one of the designated ADA-accessible stops.
The RTA had held a news conference in 2020 to celebrate building 12 accessible stops in response to a previous discrimination lawsuit. Edmunds said the agency had only done the bare minimum. His lawsuit alleged the RTA should not be able to refuse his son service at stops where the wheelchair lift could be safely deployed and there was enough room to safely get on and off.
At a hearing in December, RTA attorney Sundiata Haley asked Edmunds if he was seeking special treatment. Judge Brown cut him off:
“I will ask you to refrain from using the words ‘special treatment’ because the Americans with Disabilities Act provides that right to individuals with disability to be treated appropriately.”
Haley apologized for offending the court.
Oscar’s mother, Cristina Perez Edmunds, cheered the judge for “shutting it down very quickly.”
“It's not special treatment,” Cristina said. “We're looking for the same treatment that everyone else gets.”
Monday was not actually the first time Oscar was able to board the streetcar at one of the 66 court-approved stops. Judge Brown and her court staff went out to the streetcar line with the Edmunds family in January and watched them board and disembark at more than a half-dozen stops.
In her ruling Thursday, Brown wrote that what she saw at site visit led her to grant a temporary injunction ordering the RTA to let Oscar board at the additional locations.
The case has not yet gone to trial, so for now, the ruling only applies to Oscar, who was born with a rare genetic disorder, 21q Partial Deletion Syndrome. But his father hopes the court will force the RTA to apply it to all people in wheelchairs that can safely mount the lift.
Three of the green St. Charles Avenue streetcars have the wheelchair lifts, and only two are available on the route at any given time. In response to the lawsuit, the agency did update its Le Pass smartphone app that tracks each streetcar so it indicates if a car is wheelchair-accessible. Eventually, Edmunds hopes the agency will do more to make all its cars and stops accessible.
“Long term, we're trying to force full compliance with the ADA,” Chris Edmunds said. “So, we want every single streetcar to have a wheelchair lift. And we want every single stop to be wheelchair accessible.”
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