My dad at 50 got a disabled parking placard. He did have knee surgery, but he really didn't struggle with it about 4 months after his surgery. I asked him why he still had it - I got the impression that at this point he wanted his priority parking spot anyway. Didn't like driving around with him much after that.
I wouldn't hold that against him that much--the overabundance of handicapped parking spots is reason enough to game that one. It's ridiculous. My wife could have qualified for a placard because of her cancer and she was in a wheelchair for awhile, but we didn't bother getting one.
I once lived with a guy who had a valid disabled parking placard. But he didn't like to use it because he didn't feel like he really needed it. Once the apartment manager basically begged him to use it because parking was scarce in the complex and the disabled parking was under-utilized.
I don't think the dad necessarily sucks here. The dad didn't make up the system.
That's over the entire population, which includes the elderly. For the 18-34yo block, it's 8.3%, and you'd probably expect it even lower for ... well, the population that, to put it bluntly, succeeded in life enough to get into Stanford.
Edit: And to clarify, just to be fair, I can accept there are many things that would qualify as "a disability that the education system should care about" but which don't rise to the level of the hard binary classification of "disabled" that would show up in government stats. I'm just saying that the overall 25% figure isn't quite applicable here.
I would love to have experts look at the data of this self reported community survey vs the CDC's data.
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To the edit, I can agree.
We are talking ultimately what ADA classifies as a dissability. Which is different from what might be needed for driving (as an example).
ADA has requirements. Doctors have their definitions. They're being met.
If a doctor abuses it, then we should be going for the doctors. As was said in another comment, while they are human and susceptible, they also are the ones with the license.
We don't know what's the percentage broken down by age.
If 38% is almost 50%, 25% is almost 38%.