I need me one of these
I thought this was pretty cool. The photo doesn't say exactly where this is taken, but from other photos by the same photographer, I am guessing Laos. The available caption indicates that this was seen while working on a clinical (for nursing, perhaps) at a leprosy colony.
It is a color photo of a motorbike -- with steering handlebars like a moped -- designed with a platform so a driver using a wheelchair can roll onto the platform. It's not clear how many wheels the vehicle has but one is visible on the driver's left, and another on the right with what seems to be a passenger seat behind it. I think it is a kind of taxi service a disabled person could operate. Parts of the vehicle are beige and other parts a bright pretty blue that matches the international wheelchair symbol sign on the front of the vehicle.
Flickr photo by kasartoris
5 comments:
That's very cool! Don't think I've ever seen a vehicle adapted like that. What I like about it is that it retains a motorcycle "look" along with the platform.
I've seen vehicles like that (minus the sidecar) in the Netherlands and the UK. If I was in the market for a new vehicle (and, uh, used a manual chair ... and had more upper body strength ... oh, be quiet), I would so want one.
Once upon a time when I was a young wastrel, a bunch of my legal secretary/maenad friends and I went to celebrate Cinco de Mayo in the bars of Venice Beach, CA. We met a guy who had been paralyzed from the waist down in a motorcycle accident who not only danced with us in his wheelchair, out on the dance floor and everything, but showed us his new ride when the bar closed and threw us all out. It was his old motorcycle, only it had been adapted much like this, so that where there had been the normal seat set-up, now there was this great platform big enough for the wheelchair. I regret that I was kind of loaded when I saw it, because I would have liked to have told you more of the details, but it was still a motorcycle he could power and steer himself; that was the whole point.
I love the fact that this one has a sidecar, or a side-cycle. I love the idea of it being a taxi, that a person in a wheelchair could conceivably make a living this way in a warm climate. Ingenious.
Now the most serious question about all this is what color you'd want yours to be. It is a nice blue, but red could be so hot and black with lots of chrome could be fierce.
Ruth: Yes! It still has the motorcycle look instead of the golfcart or tiny trolley look.
mage: Heh. I know. it wouldn't work for my scooter either, but it's a lovely dream.
Sara: Peter Dinklage's character in that awful movie Tiptoes had a three-wheeled motorcycle retrofitted for his small size. Giant bike fit for tiny man. It was possibly the best part of the movie to see him cruising the highway on that thing.
Blue. Or Red. Or even a lime green. I lived in Arizona too long to get excited about black on my imaginary motorcycle.
That bike is so awesome. I'm just imagining the possibilities of being the disabled driver instead of the drivee--you could fit a kid, a sibling, a spouse, a friend, a hitchhiker, or even your dog in that sidecar. Voila, independence and power dynamics shift all in one.
Love it. Of course I immediately imagined my daughter in the sidecar wearing a matching blue helmet.
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