ADA for Accessible Streets, Day 1

Today I attended a seminar on new guidelines regarding accessible streets — making sure all citizens can use the public space. We focused today on the physical sidewalk design, ramps and crossings. Tomorrow we will be looking at signals.

I want to thank Mayor Slay, Board of Public Service President Marjorie Melton, the Starkloff Disability Institute, and the Pyramid Companies
for putting together this excellent seminar. No, seriously. The speakers have been top notch and this has shown me that I need to know a lot more about this subject and I know all the engineers in the room certainly need to know more. This clearly demonstrates to me the City saw a lack of knowledge in a critical area and decided to take a very pro-active step to help raise the bar. Very commendable.

In a funny way, however, for the small sum of $100 they are helping me better understand new regulations relative to accessibilty in the public-right-of-way which I will turn around and use to be critcal of future projects. But maybe, just maybe, this will be good. They will have a better understanding of the new rules and knowing that I will be out there with my camera (and soon a new digital level) they will hopefully take the time to get it right.

Granted, they have projects already in the works at this point so I know something started next week will have been designed and contracted a number of months back. But future projects such as MLK streetscape and the Euclid streetscape will need to comply, no doubt!

I realize now I had only a very basic understanding of a portion of accessibility issues. We learned about differences between manual and powered wheelchairs, persons who walk with a cane or walker, people with various types of visual disabilities. In the afternoon we broke up into teams and went out around the hotel (downtown Hilton) looking at intersection design. Reports were mixed on both older sidewalk areas and new areas such as my team’s corner at Busch Stadium. Even at Busch some slopes were beyond the limits and details were off, but nothing major. The encouraging thing was seeing the engineers from HOK and the City talking with expert Bill Hecker (shown below with level).

The agency responsible for setting standards for accessibility is the U.S. Access Board. It should be noted that after the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 they followed closely with standards for a number of areas including public buildings. Their guidelines help architects the exact specifications on things such as bathroom design, hallways and all manner of details in building open to the public such as restaurants, office buildings or civic structures. They’ve also had rules governing site design so you get things such as accessible parking spaces and connections on private developments. Yet, they are just now establishing guidelines for the public-right-of-way.

Yet another federal law requires that when local governments are repaving roads, they must make the sidewalks accessible. They’ve been using earlier guides for this purpose. Most likely your nearby corner has a ramp from the sidewalk to the street-level at the intersection. If not, don’t be surprised if your street doesn’t get repaved anytime soon. Most of the ramps that St. Louis has installed over the last 10 years don’t meet the new guidelines.

I took a break from writing this post, I just had to visit a couple of places (Southtowne Center & Loughborough Commons) to see if the intersections were as bad as I remembered. Yes, yes they are. But on the way I passed by some work being done at Gravois & Gustine. I’ve hesitated taking pictures of this yet because it is not done and didn’t want people going all ‘Matt Villa’ on me.

The cover in the PAR (Pedestrian Accessible Route) is not bad if done right. However, what you cannot see from this angle is how the concrete tapers off in a couple of directions, something we learned today could cause great instability on a wheelchair or someone using a cane/walker. From a lower angle you can get a better idea of what went wrong with this nearly finished project involving new signals and access ramps:

I fully anticipate that there will be mistakes, as we see above. It will be up to those designing the intersection to make sure the expectation is clear and the person inspecting the work must understand what is necessary. There will be times where the letter of the law cannot be met, where it is infeasible. At these times they need to show they considered alternatives and they did the best they could considering the circumstances. So while I do intend to buy a digital level I know it won’t all be perfect. I’ll be looking for more obvious mistakes, ones that some good ole common sense could have prevented. A really good example of that is just down the street at Gravois & Meramec:

Here we see brand new accessible ramps for crossing both streets and a brand new signal pole blocking a new sidewalk section. Can someone please tell me the logic behind adding accessible ramps only to block the sidewalk with the traffic signal? This is a good example of where someone along the process should have said, “Uh wait a minute guys, this doesn’t look right.” And the best time for that (read: cheaper) is while the project is still on paper, not set literally in concrete!

This project is either the responsibility of MoDot or the St. Louis Board of Public Service, I’m going to ask tomorrow. MoDot, you will recall from a post earlier in the week, just ripped out 300 ramps along Lindbergh because they were not constructed at the proper angle. Moving a newly installed traffic signal is not so easy. If anything is clear to me it is this workshop on accessibility did not come soon enough, I’m glad it is here now.

Helpful Resources:

• U.S. Access Board’s page on public rights-of-way. (See 2005 revised draft guidelines)
• U.S. Dept. of Transportation’s Designing Sidewalks and Trails for Access

Update 12/15/2006 at 6:00am:

Last night I forgot to quote some of the text from the invitation about this event. I posted it back on November 17th but I think it is worth repeating:

“Compliance is no longer a guessing game. There is a right way, a wrong way and a best way. Architects, engineers, other designers, developers, builders, contractors, and city inspectors and officials now have a chance to make our community a model. This seminar will provide an opportunity to learn about the new guidelines — from experts in the accessibility field who helped develop the guidelines, and by experiencing what happens when accessibility is not addressed.”

The bold emphasis is theirs, not mine. However, it does appear many have simply been guessing (and poorly). It was repeated a number of times at the event and deserves notation here — the standards set by the government are the minimum for compliance. Minimum. Not ideal, not best practices, and certainly not a world leader for modeling accessibilit. I think we need to work on getting to minimum compliance!

Update 12/15/2006 at 9:00am:

The intersection work being done along Gravois is the handy work of MoDot — the folks about to spend $500 million on highway forty.  Let’s hope it is better planned than these sidewalks.