I’m going to reproduce a comment from another blog discussion of this issue because it sums up the issues so well (the text in italics is from a comment of mine that this is responding to):

L and I were discussing this earlier - I suspect if I’d been on that train and people in uniforms with walkie-talkies told me to get off and they were walking around the disabled person, my first assumption wouldn’t be that the disabled person would subsequently be abandoned.

Absolutely. I didn’t mean to lift an ounce off the shoulders of The Authorities and place it on the fellow passengers. What I’m suggesting is that when the People In Uniforms With Walkie-Talkies (PIUWWT) make the evacuation announcement, they should add/have added “the evacuation ramps cannot accommodate wheelchairs, so please assist disabled passengers in any way you can.”

I don’t have a rosy view of human nature, but I’m not jaded enough to believe that out of a hundred people on a train you couldn’t find four to help carry a helpless man to safety. I know I wouldn’t hesitate. The World Trade Center is a case in point — plenty of people were ready, willing and able to help once they realized they oughta.

I’d go a step further and say that every train, if not every car, should have a stretcher, or a litter, or a damn sedan chair — something to evacuate disabled passengers. A few hours’ training, and all the PIUWWT would be prepared to assist in an evacuation or direct volunteers. It’s no excuse for not building things right in the first place, but it’s something that could be in place in a matter of weeks at minimal cost while they figure out a permanent expensive fix.

I’d expect the uniformed people with walkie-talkies to At The Very Fucking Least assign one of their number to stay with him until he was evacuated.

Certainly. Maybe not if there was a raging fire, but at the very least someone should have been there to shuttle back and forth with food, water and medication. The account of McCauley’s ordeal has me scratching my head — there are procedures to lift an injured fisherman from a ship at sea in a typhoon faster than that.

Bolded emphasis on the last line mine.

I’m also dismayed that the 000 emergency services just handed Macauley off back to Cityrail’s utterly inadequate emergency procedures, even when he told them that he needed medication urgently. That doesn’t seem to be being examined anywhere that I’ve noticed yet.

This is something I’m obviously very personally concerned by - as an above knee amputee, who with the best prosthetic leg in the world is still less mobile than many folks, and who may end up in a wheel chair when I’m old(er).