Between Departure and Arrival: Travel, Transit, and the Politics of Access

Movement is often described as a basic freedom; an unremarkable act rendered meaningful only by destination. Yet for many people, movement through the world is neither neutral nor guaranteed. It is shaped by systems that quietly determine whose bodies are anticipated, whose needs are accommodated by default, and whose presence must be justified repeatedly simply to proceed.

This piece exists at the intersection of personal reflection, practical guidance, and disability justice. It treats travel not as leisure alone, but as infrastructure, physical, social, and political. From local commutes to long-distance journeys, the act of moving exposes how deeply access, autonomy, and care are embedded in design choices that are often invisible to those who benefit from them most.

Preparation as an Act of Survival and Self-Determination

In mainstream discourse, preparation is framed as a personal virtue, evidence of diligence or foresight. Disability justice reframes preparation entirely. For many disabled people, preparation is not optimization; it is survival.

Planning a journey may require assessing physical accessibility, sensory conditions, cognitive demands, medical contingencies, and the likelihood that promised accommodations will be inconsistently applied or fail outright. For individuals with mobility disabilities, chronic pain, autoimmune disorders, or fatigue-related conditions, even minor disruptions can cascade into physical harm. For those with psychiatric disabilities, trauma histories, or neurodivergence, unpredictability itself may be the primary barrier.

Preparation, then, is not anxiety-driven excess. It is the labor imposed by systems that externalize risk onto individuals rather than distributing responsibility collectively through inclusive design.

Traveling Near Home and the Illusion of Familiarity

Local travel is often presumed to be simpler, more forgiving because of familiarity. Yet proximity does not guarantee access. Sidewalks without curb cuts, transit stations with perpetually broken elevators, unreliable paratransit schedules, and inconsistent signage create daily barriers that quietly restrict participation.

For many disabled people, traveling within one’s own community requires continuous vigilance: monitoring service updates, building redundant plans, and preparing for the possibility of confrontation or dismissal when access fails. This labor is cumulative. Over time, it narrows life; not through lack of interest, but through exhaustion.

Familiarity can even enable neglect. When systems are assumed to “mostly work,” recurring failures are dismissed as minor inconveniences rather than patterns of exclusion. The result is not simply inconvenience, but erosion of trust and belonging.

Long-Distance Travel and the Fragility of Institutional Promises

Long-distance transit, airports, rail systems, intercity buses magnify both dependence and vulnerability. Accessibility services exist, but they are often fragmented across departments, inconsistently staffed, and under-resourced. Wheelchairs are damaged, assistance arrives late, and medical equipment is treated as optional cargo rather than essential infrastructure.

Disability justice challenges the framing of these incidents as rare mistakes. They are structural outcomes of systems designed for efficiency, speed, and profit, rather than for human variability. When failures occur, responsibility is diffused onto policy, onto frontline staff, or onto the traveler themselves.

Autonomy is celebrated rhetorically, yet practically undermined. Independence is conflated with self-sufficiency, ignoring the reality that all travel relies on interdependence, just unevenly acknowledged.

Beyond Autism: Recognizing the Full Spectrum of Disability

Accessibility conversations frequently default to autism as a stand-in for disability writ large. While autism is a vital part of the discourse, it does not encompass the full range of disabled experience, nor should it be expected to.

Travel affects:

• Wheelchair users and mobility aid users, including those who are ambulatory but require support intermittently
• People with chronic illnesses, whose capacity fluctuates and is often misread as unreliability
• Individuals with sensory processing differences, for whom noise, lighting, crowd density, or vibration can be disabling
• People with intellectual and developmental disabilities, who may face communication barriers or paternalistic treatment
• Those with psychiatric disabilities, including anxiety disorders, PTSD, and dissociative conditions
• People with invisible disabilities, whose needs are routinely questioned or dismissed

Disability justice insists that access is not about accommodating a single profile. It is about designing for multiplicity; needs that overlap, diverge, and shift across time and context.

The Emotional, Cognitive, and Physical Labor of Transit

Travel is not only logistical; it is psychological. Transit environments are dense with stimuli, unpredictability, and time pressure. For many, this results in sensory overload, heightened anxiety, dissociation, or physical depletion long before arrival.

This dimension of travel is rarely acknowledged, yet it shapes decision-making profoundly. Choosing routes that feel safer, carrying regulation tools or familiar objects, scheduling recovery time, and limiting exposure are not signs of fragility; they are adaptive strategies in environments that demand resilience without offering reciprocity.

Preparation here becomes a form of self-regulation, not weakness.

What We Rarely Say Out Loud

There are realities of travel that are often softened or avoided:

• The fear of being stranded without support
• The humiliation of repeatedly justifying access needs
• The risk of medical crises far from home
• The calculation of whether an experience is “worth the cost” to one’s body or mind
• The grief of opting out, not by choice, but by necessity

Disability justice makes room for these truths. It rejects narratives that frame perseverance as a virtue while ignoring the harm caused by inaccessible systems. It affirms the right to rest, refusal, and safety without requiring explanation.

Intersecting Systems Beyond Disability

Disability does not exist in isolation. Race, class, age, gender, language access, and immigration status shape how one is treated while traveling. Surveillance, profiling, and institutional distrust compound access barriers, particularly for those already marginalized.

For some, transit is not only inaccessible it is actively hostile. A disability justice lens insists that access cannot be separated from broader systems of power, and that “neutral” infrastructure often reflects deeply unequal assumptions.

Guidance Rooted in Justice, Not Individual Burden

While systemic change is essential, individuals must still navigate present realities. Preparation can be reframed not as a personal burden, but as collective knowledge:

• Drawing on community-shared strategies and lived expertise
• Documenting barriers to reveal patterns rather than isolated failures
• Naming limits in advance rather than negotiating them mid-crisis
• Allowing recovery to be part of the journey, not an afterthought

Preparation becomes an act of alignment, honoring one’s needs without internalizing systemic failure as personal inadequacy.

Reimagining Movement as Collective Responsibility

Travel reveals who a society expects to move freely and who must negotiate their presence at every turn. Disability justice does not ask for special treatment; it demands equitable design grounded in interdependence. Access is not a courtesy. It is infrastructure. It is dignity. It is belonging.

Between departure and arrival lies more than distance. There lies a question that extends beyond disability alone: Who is the world built for, and who is required to labor simply to pass through it?

A Measured Call to Action: From Awareness to Responsibility

Disability justice reminds us that access is not an individual favor, nor a matter of goodwill alone. It is a collective responsibility; one that must be embedded into policy, infrastructure, and cultural expectation rather than deferred to personal resilience.

For institutions and systems, this means moving beyond compliance toward accountability: designing transit that anticipates human variability, funding accessibility as essential infrastructure, and centering disabled voices, not as consultants of last resort, but as experts from the outset.

For professionals, planners, and advocates, it requires interrogating whose experiences are prioritized and whose are treated as edge cases. Access failures should be understood not as anomalies, but as data, evidence of systemic design choices that demand revision.

For individuals, disabled and non-disabled alike, it calls for a shift in perspective. Preparation should not be romanticized as strength, nor invisibilized as personal preference. When someone builds redundancy into their movement through the world, they are not asking for accommodation; they are compensating for its absence.

Disability justice does not demand perfection. It asks for honesty, interdependence, and sustained attention to the conditions that make participation possible, or impossible, for many. Meaningful change begins when access is treated not as a specialized concern, but as a measure of collective care.

A Note of Thanks to the Reader

Thank you for taking the time to engage with this reflection. Reading, like travel, is an act of movement; through ideas, through lived realities, and through perspectives that may challenge what feels familiar or assumed.

Whether this piece affirmed your own experiences or expanded your understanding of others’, your attention matters. Change does not begin only in policy rooms or transit authorities; it also begins in how we listen, what we notice, and whose labor we are willing to see.

Thank you for meeting this work with presence and consideration.

Ian Allan

Self-Advocate for The Arc of Northern Virginia

Ian Allan is a self-advocate with a deep commitment to policy literacy, systems change, and disability justice. Through The Arc of Northern Virginia, he works to ensure that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are not merely served by systems, but are actively shaping them.