An accessibility dilemma

Ok, here's a dilemma.

Most journeys on route C offer low-floor buses and we have a small number of regular wheelchair users.

Because of scheduling constraints and/or capacity issues, a small number of journeys use double deckers which are step entrance vehicles, not accessible to wheelchairs. Obviously we aspire to a 100% low-floor fleet one day, but we are not there yet.

Two such journeys - the 1715 and 1815 C1 from Eastleigh - always feature double deckers.

One day last week, Karl was about to pull his double decker on to the stand to do the 1815 - his last trip - when he noticed that one of our regular wheelchair users was waiting.

At his own initiative (but with my knowledge and consent), he "borrowed" a low-floor single decker from another running line that happened to be laying over on break in the bus station at the time, operated his C1 with this bus, conveying the wheelchair user safely home in the process. At the end of his trip, he went out of his way and stayed beyond his finish time to return the low-floor to the driver who was supposed to have it, reclaim his double decker and head back to the depot.

Today, Taz was about to operate the 1715 - also with a double decker - when he noticed the same wheelchair user waiting. Unfortunately, we did not have a low-floor available at the time - they were all out in service - otherwise he would have gone out of his way to get hold of one to operate this service with.

On the one hand, this is all very admirable. And if these were journeys that normally had low-floor buses but for one reason or another had had to be replaced with step-entrance buses, I would be leading the charge to make sure we got this guy home.

However, as I said before these journeys never feature low-floor buses.

So the question is this. Are my staff justified in putting this amount of effort into finding low-floor buses when they see this guy waiting to travel on a journey which is not scheduled to be accessible, bearing in mind that there is a reason why they are scheduled this way and therefore our ability to help him will depend more on good fortune in having a spare vehicle available, and very often we won't.

Or should we be managing his expectations by explaining to him that we can't reorganise ourselves in this way every time we see him waiting to travel, and therefore 'stick to our guns' and require him (or any other customer requiring an accessible vehicle) to limit his travel choices to the journeys that we know should be low-floor, but in doing so risk disappointing a regular customer when in fact we know that on some occasions we will be able to help him?

Clearly the drivers want to help him and it is hard to tell them that they shouldn't, but if he becomes accustomed to the idea that this will happen on his behalf, will he start to expect it as routine?

As a side issue, there is an argument for giving better information in our publicity about which journeys are and are not accessible, and I intend to add this to the website in the near future. However, this customer is a regular and our schedules are very repetitive so it is not hard to work out (or indeed obtain via a simple enquiry) which journeys are not wheelchair accessible.

An interesting dilemma, I think.