I leave my apartment forty-seven minutes before a meeting that is eleven minutes away by car. This is not anxiety. This is not poor planning. This is physics — the physics of a city that was built as an obstacle course and then forgot it did that on purpose.
The elevator in my building takes four minutes on a good day. The curb cut at the end of my block has been “under repair” since October. The accessible entrance to the café where I’m meeting a colleague is around the back, through an alley that smells like something died making the same journey. The ramp has a grade that would fail any ADA inspection, but nobody has ever inspected it, because nobody with the power to inspect it has ever needed to use it.
Forty-seven minutes. For eleven minutes of distance.
This is what crip time actually means. Not the soft, poetic reframing you may have encountered in disability studies seminars — though that’s real too — but the brutal, arithmetic reality that inaccessible infrastructure imposes a scheduling tax on disabled people that compounds every single day, in every single city, and that almost nobody is counting.
I decided to count.
Six months of data the city doesn’t want
From September 2025 through February 2026, I tracked every trip I made outside my home. Every one. I logged departure times, arrival times, planned routes, actual routes, the reason for every deviation, and the minutes lost to each barrier. I used a GPS logger on my chair, a voice memo app, and a spreadsheet that grew into something that looked less like research and more like an indictment.
Here is what six months of moving through Chicago in a power wheelchair produced:
Total trips logged: 847
Total minutes lost to inaccessibility barriers: 11,439
That is 190.6 hours. Nearly eight full days. In six months.
Let me say that differently: the city of Chicago stole eight days of my life in half a year, not through malice — or not only through malice — but through the accumulated friction of a built environment that treats my existence as an edge case.
The biggest time thieves, in order:
-
Broken or out-of-service elevators in transit stations — 3,211 minutes lost. The CTA’s elevator uptime data, which they publish quarterly, claims 96.2% reliability. My data says the number is functionally meaningless, because the 3.8% downtime is not distributed randomly. It clusters at the stations I need most, during the hours I need them most, and it cascades — one broken elevator doesn’t just add a delay, it forces a complete route recalculation that can triple a journey.
-
Sidewalk obstructions and construction detours without accessible alternatives — 2,847 minutes. A construction fence across a sidewalk is a five-second inconvenience for a walking person who steps into the street and back. For me, it’s a two-block detour to the next curb cut, assuming that curb cut exists, assuming it’s not blocked by a parked car, assuming the detour route itself isn’t also under construction.
-
Waiting for accessible vehicles — 2,106 minutes. Chicago’s paratransit system has a pickup window of zero to twenty minutes. In practice, the window is zero to forty-five. I have waited over an hour. The system counts a vehicle as “on time” if it arrives within the window. The window is the lie that makes the statistics work.
-
Inaccessible or nominally accessible entrances — 1,894 minutes. The back entrance. The freight elevator. The “just let me find someone with the key.” The door that is technically wide enough but opens the wrong way, so I need to back up into traffic to clear the swing radius. Every one of these encounters costs time, but it also costs something the spreadsheet can’t capture — the cognitive overhead of never knowing whether you can enter a building until you are physically in front of it.
-
Grade and surface issues — 1,381 minutes. Broken pavement. Cobblestones. That particular kind of cracked concrete where one slab has heaved up two inches and created a wall that’s invisible in photos but impassable in a chair. Snow and ice clearance that treats curb cuts as optional. The city’s idea of “accessible” and the actual physics of wheels and gravity do not agree.
The compounding problem
Here is the thing about a scheduling tax: it doesn’t just steal the minutes of the detour. It steals the minutes you add before the detour, because you know the detour is coming. Or might be coming. Or came last time and might come again.
Crip time mapped — the arithmetic of inaccessible infrastructure across a single week
I call this the buffer tax — the time you add to every journey not because of a specific barrier you know about, but because of the specific uncertainty that any barrier might appear. A walking person leaving for a meeting across town budgets for the journey. I budget for the journey plus a margin of error that accounts for an infrastructure I cannot trust.
Over six months, my buffer time — the minutes I added preemptively, beyond what the trip would take on a perfectly accessible route — totaled another 4,200 minutes. Seventy hours. Nearly three more days.
So the real number isn’t eight days. It’s eleven.
Eleven days in six months that the city took from me for the crime of using wheels instead of legs.
And I’m one person. With a power chair, which is faster than a manual chair. With the resources to own a smartphone and run GPS tracking software. With a flexible work schedule that lets me absorb delays without losing a paycheck.
What does this number look like for a manual wheelchair user working an hourly job with a supervisor who doesn’t consider “the elevator was broken” a legitimate excuse for being late?
I’ll tell you what it looks like: it looks like unemployment. It looks like the exposed mechanism inside the statistic that disabled people are employed at roughly half the rate of nondisabled people and everyone treats this as a mystery about “skills gaps” and “employer attitudes” when it is also, irreducibly, a problem of time — time that inaccessible cities extract from disabled people and that no one reimburses.
The map nobody asked for
I mapped every barrier I encountered. All 1,247 discrete accessibility failures, geotagged and timestamped. When you plot them, they don’t scatter randomly across the city. They cluster. They form corridors of exclusion — routes that are theoretically accessible and practically impossible, neighborhoods where the density of barriers creates what I started calling temporal deserts: areas where the scheduling tax is so high that the rational decision is simply not to go there.
I have a temporal desert three blocks from my apartment. It’s a strip of restaurants and shops along a street where the sidewalk is interrupted by four construction sites, two of which have been “temporary” for over a year, and where the nearest functioning curb cut requires a six-block detour. A nondisabled person can walk that strip in four minutes. My fastest logged time is twenty-three minutes. My slowest is forty-one, because of a delivery truck parked across the one accessible path.
I don’t go there anymore. I used to. There’s a bookstore I loved. There’s a taqueria that knows my order. But the time cost is too high, and so I have been priced out — not by rent, not by gentrification in the way we usually discuss it, but by minutes. By the accumulated friction of a street that doesn’t want me on it, or more precisely, that was designed without considering whether I might want to be on it.
This is a form of segregation that doesn’t require a sign on the door. It just requires enough broken concrete.
What planners see, and what they don’t
I presented a version of this data to an urban planning advisory committee last November. The response was instructive.
The first question was whether my experience was “representative.” Whether my data could be “generalized.” Whether a single wheelchair user’s travel log constituted a meaningful sample size.
This is the question that always comes, and it contains its own answer. My experience isn’t representative because the city doesn’t collect the data that would let you know whether it is. There is no municipal database of accessibility barrier encounters. There is no systematic tracking of time lost to inaccessible infrastructure. The absence of the data is not evidence that the problem is small. It is evidence that the problem is ignored.
The second question was about cost. How much would it cost to fix the barriers I’d identified? The implication was clear: if the cost is too high, the barrier is acceptable.
I asked a question back: How much does the scheduling tax cost disabled residents? If 11,439 minutes of my time has economic value — and it does, because I am a working professional who bills for her time — then the city is already paying for inaccessibility. It’s just making disabled people pay for it instead of the infrastructure budget.
Nobody had an answer to that. The meeting moved on to a discussion about bike lanes.
The hidden tax made visible — wheelchair route vs walking route overlaid on city grid
The clock that runs differently
Crip time, in disability culture, has a double meaning. It refers to the literal extra time that disabled people need to navigate a world not built for them — the scheduling tax I’ve been describing. But it also refers to a different relationship to time itself, a temporality shaped by bodies that don’t move at the speed the built environment assumes, by lives organized around pain cycles and energy management and the unpredictable cascading failures of infrastructure that was never reliable to begin with.
I live in both of these meanings simultaneously. The spreadsheet captures one. The other lives in the exhaustion I feel at 4 p.m. — not from the day’s work, but from the day’s navigation. From the cognitive load of route-planning around uncertainty. From the emotional weight of being late to things I cared about because a machine I depend on wasn’t working and nobody responsible for that machine considers my lateness their problem.
Here is what I want urban planners, transit authorities, and city officials to understand: crip time is not a metaphor. It is a measurable quantity. It can be logged, mapped, and costed. And the fact that you are not measuring it is a choice — a choice that allows you to treat eleven stolen days as an externality rather than an injustice.
What would change if time mattered
Imagine a city that tracked the scheduling tax the way it tracks traffic congestion. Imagine accessibility failures triggering the same urgency as a blocked intersection — because that’s what they are, for the people who encounter them. Imagine elevator downtime at a transit station being treated as a service outage affecting every disabled rider who depends on that station, with the same real-time alerts and the same accountability metrics that apply to signal failures.
Imagine a city that published a Temporal Equity Index — a measure of how much longer it takes disabled residents to reach the same destinations as nondisabled residents, updated in real time, broken down by neighborhood, treated as a core indicator of whether the city is functioning.
This isn’t utopian. It’s data infrastructure. Cities already have the sensors, the GPS data, the transit logs. They already measure how long it takes an ambulance to reach a hospital and how long a bus takes to complete a route. The technology to measure the scheduling tax exists. The will to measure it does not, because measuring it would make the tax visible, and visibility would make it politically untenable.
This is why the data isn’t collected. Not because it’s hard. Because it’s damning.
The eleven days
I want my eleven days back. I know I’m not getting them. They’ve been absorbed into the infrastructure, metabolized by a city that converts disabled time into nondisabled convenience — because every dollar not spent on elevator maintenance, every construction permit issued without an accessible detour plan, every sidewalk left unrepaired is a transfer of time from people who need that infrastructure to people who don’t notice it’s missing.
But I want you to know the number. I want the number to sit in your head the next time someone describes an accessibility failure as a minor inconvenience. Eleven days. And counting. Every six months. For every year of my life in this city.
The city is not broken. It is working