Back in 2014 the Chicago Tribune published an op-ed piece I wrote that was titled “Should ride-sharing services adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act?” Five years have passed, and Lyft and Uber still claim they don’t have to follow ADA guidelines.

A story in Politico last week reports that Lyft is fighting a federal class action lawsuit filed in New York’s Westchester County on the grounds that “it is not in the transportation business.”

Ahead of its public offering, Lyft acknowledged it has been involved in legal battles about its ongoing refusal to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. From The Politico story :

“For a company that says they want to do the right thing — they should do the right thing,” said attorney Jeremiah Lee Frey-Pearson, who is representing the plaintiffs in the New York class action lawsuit. “Not serving people with disabilities is very inconsistent with the public message that Lyft wants to send as being an inclusive and progressive company.”

Suits have been filed against Uber, too, and Uber also maintains that its drivers do not have to follow the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Attorney rei-Pearson told Politico that he and his colleagues have been reluctant to sue Uber at the same time they bring up this case against Lyft because of all the other other national litigation against Uber.

The Politico story says, “Lyft continues to bill itself as a better-behaved version of arch-rival Uber,” and Campbell Matthews, a spokesperson for Lyft, wrote in an emailed statement to Politico that “We think about accessibility broadly and know that many who were previously underserved by transit and taxis are now able to rely on Lyft for convenient and affordable rides.”

So does that mean it’s okay to refuse riders with disabilities? The ADA says “public transportation authorities may not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their services,” but Uber and Lyft identify themselves as technology companies — not transportation companies. The drivers are independent, they drive their own vehicles, so Uber and Lyft feel they are not required to provide ADA-mandated vehicles and rides.

I have taken about a dozen rides on Uber and Lyft over the years. Only one driver refused to take me with my service dog, and that was a Lyft driver. Without the law on my side, my only recourse was to call another driver and hope they’d take me. It all makes me feel unworthy.

Whenever possible, I ride in a registered cab rather than using a ridesharing service. Cabs that are registered are part of a public transportation authority, registered cab drivers go through a lot of training to get their cab licenses, they are professional drivers, they know where they’re going, and when I call for a ride, I have the law on my side: the ADA prohibits public transit authorities from discriminating against people with disabilities in the provision of their services. And then there’s this: I tip well!

Now, that doesn’t guarantee that registered cab drivers will pick me up with my Seeing Eye dog, but it does guarantee I have recourse. I haven’t been refused a ride from a registerd cab in years. I think that’s because they know the law.

I get the utility of Uber and Lyft. Especially outside of major cities and downtowns. But, by all accounts, they cut every corner they can. So whenever possible, I’ll cut them out, too.

First, thanks to all of you who’ve commented or contacted me directly regarding last week’s post about people walking around while glued to their phones.

The response was such that Beth encouraged me to submit it to the Chicago Tribune Voice of the People section, essentially their letters to the editor feature. Well, it took some doing, but I managed to cut about 100 words off the blog post to reach the Tribune’s 400-word maximum, emailed it in, and the next day, voila: it was in the paper. And I got more email from friends and members of Beth’s memoir classes, who clearly read the paper every day.

All thanks to Beth, who told me to shorten my writing, and to submit. (To all of Beth’s memoir students, does that sound familiar?)

I’m supposed to be on around 7:30 a.m. tomorrow.

If you’re not sick of Mike and the Cell Phone Zombies yet, wait, there’s more! This morning I got this message from the producer of the WLS AM 890 morning radio show:

I’m helping to book the WLS AM 890 morning show. If you are the same Mike Knezovich who wrote the letter about zombie cell phone walkers I’m hoping you would be able to call into the show this week to talk about your letter, and experiences. I’d appreciate it if you could get back to me….

I did get back to him and as of this writing (things change a lot with radio scheduling, so who knows) I’m going to be calling into Tuesday morning. Now, that station is not usually my cup of tea, and one of the hosts is a somewhat infamous shock-jock, but if we stay away from politics, I think it’ll be OK. What could go wrong?

I will make sure I’m not in public and I’m sitting still while I’m on the phone. My cell phone.

Back when cell phones were relatively new, I was routinely, involuntarily made privy to half a conversation — in elevators, checkout lines, restaurants, and just walking down the sidewalk. I still remember just passing a woman on my block and hearing her, quite loudly, say “Well, don’t tell anyone, but she has breast cancer.”

A polite Zombie always pays attention.

Most people seem to have gotten the memo on this kind of thing. But then again, with ever changing technology, cell phone etiquette is like Whack-A-Mole. There’s the simply rude behavior (guilty as charged) of not putting it away. But there’s also the dangerous stuff where people fall off cliffs in an effort to get just the right photo, they’re texting and driving, and a newish behavior that seems to be proliferating. It’s what I call Zombie Cell Phone Walkers.

It happens all the time where we live. I’m walking down the sidewalk and will spot someone walking toward me in the opposite direction. The person doesn’t seem to notice that we’re headed for a collision, and then I see that it’s because she or he is holding a phone and is glued to it.

Mostly, as we get really close to one another, the Zombie Cell Phone Walker will notice me (or other objects) and veer at the last minute. But not always. I’ve had to jump out of the way in some cases, and in others, well, there has been contact. (OK, once or twice I kind of enjoyed scaring the bejesus out of the Zombie.)

The worst case? Backward Zombie Cell Phone Walking. Yep, that’s a thing. The other day I was walking with Beth, without Whitney. I was playing sighted guide, and Beth brought her white cane and held it in front of her. She doesn’t really use her white cane when she’s on my elbow, but it really helps me out. It clues in oncoming pedestrians that we can’t maneuver as easily or quickly as they expect.

That only works, of course, if they’re looking forward, and not at their phone. The other day, on State Street, as we walked north, we experienced double stupid: a young man approached us walking south, walking backward, oblivious to anyone but his girlfriend, whom he videotaped as he walked backward.

I couldn’t believe it—I even yelled, but he was completely into, well, himself. So I decided to play “I’m a wall and you’re not.” I planted my feet and let him run into me and bounce off.  He turned, looked a little bewildered, saw the white cane, then turned around and started walking backward again.

You never have a chain saw when you need one.

Then there is the Stationary Cell Phone Zombie. They stop. At turnstiles. At the bottom of stairways. At crowded intersections. To, you know, finish reading that text. Or that article. Or who knows what. But whatever it is, it’s important. Important enough to disregard everyone and everything else around them.

With any luck, and a few unfortunate accidents, this too will pass. I can only imagine what will replace it.

Lucky us! In the past ten days Whitney the Seeing Eye dog and I have had the privilege of visiting nine different classrooms at five different elementary schools. Somehow, some way, we also managed to wedge a visit to a college classroom in the midst of all those visits to third-graders –last Tuesday we gave a presentation to an animal sciences class at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

My mission was to go over some of the qualifications necessary to become a guide dog instructor and cover other guide-dog-related stuff, too. Most guide dog schools require instructors to have a college degree and then do an apprenticeship. Apprenticeships can last as long as four years — there’s a lot of learning involved when it comes to training dogs, training people who can’t see, and then making a perfect match between the human and canine. I had time to take questions after my talk, and as much as I love hearing the questions little kids come up with, I gotta admit: the questions I got from these young adults were refreshing. Here’s a sampling of what the college kids wanted to know:

• What is your favorite part about your relationships with your dogs?
• What is unique about each dog you’ve had?
• Have your Seeing Eye dogs changed your life in other ways besides just your ability to get around safely on your own?
• Do you have a favorite dog?
• Is there anything particularly inconvenient about having a Seeing Eye dog?
• If you had the option to replace guide dogs with a form of technology that worked as well, would you opt for that or the dogs?
• How would you know if your dog was sick or not feeling well?
• What would happen if your dog got sick? How would you get around?
• Are the dogs expensive? How do you handle the vet care and other expenses?
• What is the most life changing thing that you have learned or experienced since becoming blind?
• What is something you want people to know or do that could make your life easier?
• What was the hardest thing to relearn after going blind?
• Is it frustrating not knowing what new things that didn’t exist before you went blind look like? You know, like Smart Phones and Apple Watches and other new technology?

I was impressed with –- and flattered by –- how thoughtful their questions were. Their professor, Sarah Richardson, showed the documentary Pick of the Litter after we left.

Warning: Rated XXX for puppy porn.

Pick of the Litter does a tremendous job explaining how schools decide which puppies pass the audition to go on to train as guide dogs, and who knows? After hearing my explanation of the apprenticeship program for guide dog trainers last Tuesday, maybe some of those U of I students will end up auditioning for an apprenticeship after they graduate. I think that’d be pretty darn cool.

The first time I operated a clutch and a manual transmission was during my first summer break after my freshman year at the University of Illinois. And it wasn’t in a car, but on a motorcycle. My high school best buddy was also back after his freshman year in Wisconsin. He showed up at my house with a Honda CB750, about the coolest motorcycle available at the time. He took me for a ride and invited me to give it a try—with him as a passenger.

An example of a Honda CB750. I’d ridden minibikes before, but this was the first real motorcycle.

Jimmy was and is a very trusting man.

It was herky, it was jerky, but hell if it wasn’t fun. A couple years later, a friend gave me instruction on his manual clutch Volvo station wagon, and for decades I never drove a car with anything but a stick shift.

I’ve always liked cars well enough but, for most of my life, I’ve been partial to motorcycles, and have owned one or another for decades. That run ended a couple years after we moved to downtown Chicago. Garaging a motorcycle is expensive in our neighborhood. More important, riding has always been an escape, a sort of meditation for me, but riding downtown—for me (lots of people do it)—just seems more like combat.

Riding a motorcycle requires hyper vigilance, wherever one rides. That may seem contradictory to my characterizing it as meditative earlier. To explain, my brain can spin hard sometimes, and it feels like I’m thinking of everything at once, unable to focus on one thing. I think it’s probably the survival instinct—nothing helps me focus and be in the moment like riding a motorcycle.

To help ameliorate the inherently greater risk of riding on two wheels instead of four, I committed myself to being as safe as I could be. I took the Motorcycle Safety Foundationclasses, I always wore a helmet and protective clothing, and I did track days. Riding on a racetrack might seem to be a dangerous thing to do, but it was infinitely safer than riding on public roads. Because, no cars. No cars to make a left in front of you. No cars to change lanes into you without notice. No cars to rear-end you at a stop sign.

The training made me a much better rider, and it improved my driving just as much. It taught me how dangerous bad behavior behind the wheel looks like from a vulnerable motorcyclist’s point of view. That just made me resolve to work harder at driving safely. Motorcycle training also taught me that what we call defensive driving shouldn’t mean passive driving. For example, if there’s a car doing weird weaving things in front of you, you look for an opportunity and then you gas it to get ahead and leave the wanderer behind.

Today, I don’t much like driving. That’s partly because I don’t do it as often, I’m sure. And because I use Zipcar, (essentially a short-hop rental service), I’m not always driving the same car. Jesus, how many different ways should there be to start the damn car? The user interfaces, in tech terms, are not in the least bit standardized between cars.

My observation is that over the past several years—here in the city, anyway—drivers have gotten worse than ever. That may also be a function of my driving less and being less sharp.

But I think there’s something else at work. There’s distracted driving, which has always been a factor, but cell phones substantially compound it. Between ride-sharing services and the myriad food delivery services, there are always a ton of cars on the road. And lots of these drivers are part-time, every-now-and then practitioners. They are slaves to their phone GPS, from what I can glean from some close calls, when the voice tells them they missed a turn and it’s rerouting, they panic and make a U-turn right in front of other drivers.

Modern cars also have tons of electronics and alerts, ostensibly to make things safer. I’m a complete believer in things like ABS and traction control, but I’m not at all certain about all the features–backup cameras, for example, leave me cold.

All of this thinking coalesced a few weeks back when I saw an article in the NY Times headlined: “Forget Self-Driving Cars. Bring Back the Stick Shift.”

The headline made me skeptical at first—maybe just another Luddite cranky guy like me wrote this?

The author is a psychiatrist, and his premise is that some safety technology has the unintended consequence of lulling drivers into being less mindful. And that driving a stick is one way of keeping a driver engaged.

And he makes a pretty good case for his hypothesis. From the piece:

“Backup cameras, mandatory on all new cars as of last year, are intended to prevent accidents. Between 2008 and 2011, the percentage of new cars sold with backup cameras doubled, but the backup fatality rate declined by less than a third while backup injuries dropped only 8 percent.

Perhaps one reason is, as a report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationput it, “Many drivers are not aware of the limitations” of the technology. The report also found that one in five drivers were just like me — they had become so reliant on the backup aids that they had experienced a collision or near miss while driving other vehicles.”

The piece refers to fatalities inflicted by experimental self-driving cars. The interesting, if tragic point: During testing, these cars had a human who was there to intervene if something went wrong. But all that tech lulled the human car-sitters into inattention.

The piece closes with the author’s recollection of his first stick-shift car:

“When I bought that first five-speed BMW, my dad cautioned me about safety, thinking that driving a stick would be more distracting and less safe. He was wrong. Though research on the safety of manual transmissions is scant, one study on the driving performance of teenage boys with A.D.H.D. revealed that cars with manual transmissions resulted in safer, more attentive driving than automatics. This suggests that the cure for our attentional voids might be less technology, not more.”

Hear, hear!