LW - Not every accommodation is a Curb Cut Effect: The Handicapped Parking Effect, the Clapper Effect, and more by Michael Cohn

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Not every accommodation is a Curb Cut Effect: The Handicapped Parking Effect, the Clapper Effect, and more, published by Michael Cohn on September 15, 2024 on LessWrong.
In the fields of user experience and accessibility, everyone talks about the curb cut effect: Features that are added as accommodations for people with disabilities sometimes become widely useful and beloved. But not every accommodation becomes a "curb cut," and I've been thinking about other patterns that come up when accommodations intersect with wider society.
The original Curb Cut Effect
The eponymous curb cut -- the place at the intersection where the sidewalk slopes down to the street instead of just dropping off -- is most obviously there to for wheelchair users. But it's also great for people who are pulling a suitcase, runners who want to avoid jarring their ankles, and people who are walking their bikes.
Universal captioning on TV, movies, and video is nominally for Deaf or hearing-impaired people, but captions are handy to anyone who's watching TV in a noisy restaurant, or trying to make sense of a show with artistically muddy audio, or trying to watch a video at 3x speed and the audio is unintelligible. When we make products easier to use, or spaces easier to access, it's not just some essentialized group of people with disabilities who benefit -- accessibility is good for everyone.
Why the idea is useful: First, it breaks down the perspective of disability accommodations as being a costly charity where "we" spend resources to help "them." Further, it breaks down the idea of disability as an essentialized, either-or, othered type of thing.
Everybody has some level of difficulty accessing parts of the world some of the time, and improving accessibility is an inherent part of good design, good thinking, and good communication.[1] Plus, it's cool to be aware of all the different ways we can come up with to hack our experience of the world around us!
I think there's also a dark side to the idea -- a listener could conclude that we wouldn't invest in accommodations if they didn't happen to help people without disabilities. A just and compassionate society designs for accessibility because we value everybody, not because it's secretly self-interested.
That said, no society spends unlimited money to make literally every experience accessible to literally every human. There's always a cost-benefit analysis and sometimes it might be borderline. In those cases there's nothing wrong with saying that the benefits to the wider population tip the balance in favor of investing in accessibility.
But when it comes to things as common as mobility impairments and as simple as curb cuts, I think it would be a moral no-brainer even if the accommodation had no value to most people.
The Handicapped Parking effect
This edgier sibling of the curb cut effect comes up when there's a limited resource -- like handicapped parking. There are only X parking spaces within Y feet of the entrance to the Chipotle, and if we allocate them to people who have trouble getting around, then everyone else has a longer average walk to their car.
That doesn't mean it's zero-sum: The existence of a handicapped parking spot that I can't use might cost me an extra 20 seconds of walking, but save an extra five minutes of painful limping for the person who uses it.[2] This arrangement probably increases overall utility both in the short term (reduced total pain experienced by people walking from their cars) and in the long term (signaling the importance of helping everyone participate in society).
But this is manifestly not a curb cut effect where everyone benefits: You have to decide who's going to win and who's going to lose, relative to an unregulated state where all parking is first-come-first-served.
Allocation can be made well or p...