THERE'S no doubt about it, in the battle of wheelchair versus pushchair, the wheelchair deserves to win. The Supreme Court made the right decision last week over the case of Doug Paulley, who had been left at a bus stop because a mother with a sleeping baby refused to move her buggy out of the wheelchair space. The wheelchair, the judge said, takes precedence. This should be welcomed for its clarity. No-one can have any uncertainty now that the wheelchair space is for wheelchairs, and buggy-users should vacate it the moment a wheelchair-user pitches up.

This is an important bolstering of the rights of the disabled at a time when their mobility is being decreased by benefit cuts. It’s also a reminder that it is for wheelchair-users that those spaces create, after persistent lobbying by activists. Essentially, parents are piggybacking on their hard work.

But there’s still something depressing in the debate around this. It seems to have been used as an excuse to have a go at mothers everywhere for taking up space in the world, from articles about “the menace of mumspreading” (Jane Merrick in the IBT) to social media gripes about mothers and children in public spaces. In many of these tales, the mother with a buggy – and it’s always “mums” that are being complained about – is caricatured as if she were the pavement equivalent of a 4x4 driver spewing out fumes and taking up space, without a care for anyone else in the world. It’s not a version of parenting I recognise, either in myself or most of the people I know, for whom bringing up small children has been a struggle against chronic tiredness, the exhaustions of feeding routines and recalcitrant baby-carrying machinery.

There’s something wrong with a world that pitches wheelchairs against pushchairs or, to put it in real human terms, the disabled person against parent and child, with the latter, currently, as the demon and problem. That’s a society that doesn’t have very much space for anyone other than the smooth-functioning, independent individual. It’s a world that still has the able-bodied, unencumbered man at its centre. It’s like watching a gladiatorial battle in which two groups, who never should be pitched against each other, are forced to fight.

The result in this case is that mothers have become the baddies. Yet we know little about the mother concerned in the Doug Paulley case, except that she didn't want to move her sleeping baby. Perhaps she was smugly selfish, or perhaps she was exhausted and filled with horror at the thought of waking her child. There’s self-centredness in that too, a lack of imagination and consideration, but one we might have a smidge of compassion for.

For the problem is not mothers, or fathers even, amongst whom, like all demographics, there will be the odd person who really doesn’t give a monkey's for anyone else. The problem is that actually, in many places, we still do not have public transport that works for everyone, and particularly not, still, for wheelchair users.

Partly it is a problem of bus design. “The issue has actually never really been about a parent’s willingness to move the buggy," said wheelchair-user Mark Wilson of Transport For All, the London-based accessibility campaign group that supported the Paulley case, "it is about government’s failure years ago to insist that buses should have two spaces ... one clearly designated a wheelchair space, the other a buggy space."

What happened with Lothian buses in Edinburgh in recent times is quite instructive. From 2009, to preserve accessibility, there was what was called a “pram ban”. Some drivers were letting passengers ride on the buses with buggies unfolded, though some were more strict. A long-running campaign was launched by a group called Babies On Buses. In 2012, Kelsey Bryce, a 20-year-old new mother, out for the first time with her six-day-old baby, brought a bus to a standstill because she refused to get off when the driver said her buggy was not allowed on because it was not foldable. The end result was that Lothian buses put on many more buses with two spaces and the ban ended.

As a solution it's still not perfect, but, particularly in conjunction with this new ruling, it's part of the answer.

We need a public transport system that is truly inclusive. We need it to have enough space to embrace the way we move around the world today – whether with shopping trolleys, pushchairs, mobility scooters or wheelchairs. We need buses that don’t leave wheelchair-users or parents on the roadside in the torrential rain. We need to make it easy for those mothers, who can often feel isolated, to get out into the world, and for us all to feel that the bus is a better option than the car.

Let’s not make this a cage-fight between two sets of wheels, or two groups who have needs. Rather it should be a spur towards creating a public transport system that is fit for all.