First milestone towards a bigger cause………
Each step taken to move towards a goal is a milestone for me. Encourage yourself, motivate your own soul, and acknowledge your own efforts so that you can create a “Synergy” in the society.
To create this synergy, I planned an Accessibility Car Drive in Lahore. Since this was my first Accessibility meet-up during the smart lockdown period, therefore, I kept it for a concise period. The drive was only for an hour in a particular area of Lahore in Iqbal Town. The reason for choosing this area was that it wasn’t locked down due to Covid-19, and I could experience a variety of national and international chain’s Accessibility features.
Luckily and fortunately as I planned the roads were empty, and I could easily reach my starting destination right in time. As I mentioned earlier, we are still facing smart lockdown; therefore, other Local Guides couldn’t join, and I had to start my drive alone.
Iqbal town is one of the busiest roads in terms of shopping. All international and national brands are located in this area. Both sides of the roads are flooded with these brands. This creates a very healthy business opportunity for the entrepreneurs and ease for the customers to buy the stuff from one location.
The very first shopping mall I encountered was Al-Naseer, a Kuwait leading sports and fashion retailer. It was located on the first floor of that plaza while the ground floor was occupied by other retailer outlets. For the ease of the customers, they have installed an Accessibility lift BUT……
Like we say, common sense is not common, and I could actually feel this thing here. They installed the accessibility lift but there was no ramp for the entrance. So all I can conclude is that this option is useless for wheelchair-accessible public.
Moving forward, there weren’t many multi-story buildings constructed in this area. The majority of the shops had entrances at the ground floor but I guess they never thought of adding any ramp for the Accessibility. Each shop had one footstep at the entrants which isn’t a big deal for all of us. Yet keeping Accessibility options for all of us, they need to think out of the comfort zone.
HOLD ON FOR A SECOND!
Do you know your edits are published in just minutes now?
Yes, it is true. I edited the timings of the shops I visited, and I received the published email in a few minutes. BOOM… impressive.
So thumbs up for the Google support team for supporting the community at the back end 
As mentioned earlier, I encountered different national and multination brands, and wheelchair Accessibility entrances are ignored by the majority of the shops.**Shockingly 
!**Domino’s, an international food-chain, did not provide any wheelchair entrance or wheelchair parking.
Let’s make a commitment today, whenever you visit a place just add a two-liner review making a request to the management to install ramps for wheelchair entrance.
Finally, I would like to share the best thing in my Accessibility Car Drive. There was a mall that had four shops, and to make all shops accessible to wheelchair entrance they added a ramp on one corner of the mall. So all of these shops can easily be accessed by wheelchair users.
This shows that we can create a bigger impact by just getting out of the comfort zone and focus on our available resources.
Cheers to my Community.
Do share your suggestion in comments so that I can improve my map edits in the future.
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and taking as much time as i wanted at a single site. And since I didn’t plan any snack breaks so an hour was enough for me to capture the targeted location.
so usually focus on map editing when I’m out. And pictures are my target when Im on a trip. So I made the edits at the spot and luckily got the approvals in just minutes.
