Ramped curbs are omnipresent these days. It’s extremely rare for me to encounter a curb that doesn’t have a ramp so that people who use wheelchairs, like me, can get up and down when crossing the street.
But what about when a blind person needs to cross the street? People who aren’t blind rely heavily on visual cues to tell us when it is safe to cross, such as WALK and DON’T WALK signals. But what happens if you can’t see things like that? Crossing streets would be a harrowing experience.
Blind people need audio or tactile signals to be able to navigate through cities, just like I need curb ramps. And devices that provide such signals have been around for a long time. They’re called accessible pedestrian signals (APS).
You would think that APS would be as omnipresent as curb ramps by now, since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed more than thirty-two years ago. But here in Chicago, APS are so rare that some blind people had to sue the city to get them to take installing these devices seriously. And recently, they won a big decision that should help a lot.
Their lawsuit, American Council of the Blind of Metropolitan Chicago v. City of Chicago, was filed in a district court in 2019. Three blind individuals also joined in as plaintiffs. One claimed she once stepped in front of an oncoming bus and the only reason she wasn’t hit was because a nearby sighted pedestrian yanked her back onto the sidewalk, out of harm’s way. But the bus still hit and split her white cane.
According to the complaint, there are 2,672 signalized traffic intersections in Chicago, but only eleven of them have devices that assist blind people at crosswalks.
Another plaintiff said she was once hit by a car while crossing the street and had to get eight staples in the back of her head.
According to the complaint, there are 2,672 signalized traffic intersections in Chicago, but only eleven of them have APS. It said that for years the city government installed new traffic signals or altered old ones without installing APS.
The complaint also pointed out that the city received a grant in 2015 to fund the installation of APS at certain intersections but the devices still weren’t in place. “The City of Chicago has the financial capacity to equip its signalized intersections with APS devices and simply chooses not to do so,” reads the complaint.
All this neglect, the complaint charged, violated Title II of the ADA, which requires state and local governments to give people with disabilities an equal opportunity to benefit from all of their programs, services, and activities.
On March 31, Judge Elaine Bucklo issued a summary judgment in which she agreed that the city government was indeed violating ADA by having so few APS in service and that it must address the problem.
Bucklo’s ruling discusses and rejects the arguments of the city’s lawyers that the ADA doesn’t apply in this case. Now we’ll see if the city continues to try to weasel out of this, or if it finally does what it should have done a long time ago.