Best and Worst Places to Live for People with Disabilities

21. 06. 2021

Multiple Factors are in Play to determine Disability Friendliness of every city. The most important factors are health care, accessibility, economic environment and above all quality of life for the disabled. Also, the covid epidemic changed things drastically in the last 18 months. The quality of life of the disabled also convinces many wheelchair users to join handicap tours and visit the cities and states, where disabled have a high-quality life. In short it helps the development and rise of wheelchair tourism.

According to the website WalletHub in United States of America, the best city for living in 2020 was Overland Park in Kansas. The same website also determined that the worst city to live for the disabled in USA is Bridgeport in Connecticut.

In our country Slovenia, for years the best city for the disabled is Ljubljana, which even has disabled persons in the municipality’s city council and city’s administration. Our capital is one of the best wheelchair friendly travel destinations at the moment. Center and Old part of the town are completely accessible, flat pedestrian zones are widely present, disabled can access almost all city museums and galleries, city parks, take the boat ride on the Ljubljanica river or even take the funicular up to the Ljubljana castle. Still in our country there are several municipalities, where disabled people do not have the easiest life. These municipalities are primarily located in north-east part of the country and also in the south. There the incomes are lower than in the capital or in the tourist areas of the country and the accessibility is on much lower level compared to Ljubljana.

Other places where disabled people have good life are the Scandinavian countries and cities (Stockholm, Helsinki), which are very accessible and, in these states, there is a high level of social welfare with good health insurance and also large salaries. We’ll also mention several cities in Europe which are very accessible to the wheelchair users, like Berlin, Lyon, London, Vienna and Barcelona. Of course, the level of social state and level of health insurance is higher in some of these countries than in others.

When it comes to the worst cities to live for the disabled, it is not the easiest to determine that list, cause of multiple factors we mentioned in the beginning of the article. But at the moment, we would put on the top of that list the war-torn countries like Yemen, Libya and Syria, where in many cities, there is absolutely no city infrastructure anymore. Sadly, these countries now have much more disabled people, than 10 years ago and their lives won’t be easy at all in the future, even if the hostilities finally stop in these countries.