Nick-Philly (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A curb ramp in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
When I heard that four disabled residents of the Chicago area filed a lawsuit against the city of Chicago, charging that “public pedestrian rights of way are dilapidated, dangerous, and generally inaccessible to people with mobility disabilities,” I immediately thought about my friend Bob, a Chicagoan who became a quadriplegic after a car accident.
I recently saw a picture Bob posted on his Facebook page of him lying on the street in his neighborhood. Beside him was his empty wheelchair. Bob wrote that he had tried to roll down a curb ramp that was so broken up that he hit a bump, pitching him out of his wheelchair onto the ground.
According to the lawsuit, more than 20,000 requests for sidewalk improvements across the city have been open for at least a year, and more than 6,000 have been open for more than three years. So even if Bob had called the Chicago 311 non-emergency number to report the messed-up curb ramp, it might have taken the city a year or more to repair it.
Disability activists sued the city in 2005 for failing to install, repair, and maintain curb ramps. The lawsuit claimed that this violated the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which had been signed into law fifteen years earlier. The city settled the lawsuit in 2007 by agreeing to install thousands of new curb ramps throughout the city and improve curb ramp accessibility.
“Yet since then,” the current lawsuit states, “the city of Chicago stopped many of the systems it had implemented as part of that settlement and has failed to adequately maintain Chicago’s curb ramps.”
This is the heart of the matter: The kind of true commitment to access that the ADA is designed to bring about requires way more than a one-time, grudging and belated effort to build ramps or whatever. Stuff breaks down; true commitment to accessibility means having an ongoing plan and budget for maintenance.
In addition to all of the curb ramps in need of repair, the complaint states that “Many sidewalks are deteriorated, cracked, crumbling, sunken, uplifted, uneven, covered with holes, and/or overgrown with vegetation. They are often too narrow to traverse. And many crosswalks are deteriorated or damaged with excessive slopes, potholes, cracks, and other gaps in the surface, as well as abrupt changes in grade.”
I know that whenever I venture out onto the public walkways of Chicago in my motorized wheelchair, I tend to take familiar routes that I know have the most even terrain. Sometimes I just roll down the street because I consider that to be safer than the sidewalks. Either way, I always keep my eyes glued to the ground in front of me in the hopes of preemptively seeing a pothole or other barrier coming, so it won’t take me by surprise. Most people can just step over or around them. But when you have a disability, they can stop you dead in your tracks.