Thirty-three years ago, on July 26, 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. But even today, stories abound of disabled folks being forced to assert the power of the ADA to fight inaccessibility problems that should have been addressed a long time ago. Sometimes government entities are the most blatant violators.
When it comes to living up to their responsibilities under the ADA, these agencies seem to have a “so sue me” attitude. Rather than at least try to comply with the ADA because it’s the right thing to do, they’ll wait around to be sued before paying much attention. Thus, decades have passed—and even more decades will pass—with a lot of the exclusionary barriers the ADA was supposed to obliterate still rearing their ugly heads.
There are so many examples of government entities adopting a “so sue me” ADA strategy that trying to keep up with them would make you dizzy.
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In 2021, three disabled residents and a local disability rights organization filed a federal class action lawsuit against Baltimore’s mayor and city council, accusing the city of failing to “install and maintain curb ramps and sidewalks that are necessary to make its pedestrian right-of-way readily accessible to people with mobility disabilities.” The complaint says that an evaluation undertaken two years earlier by the city revealed that only 1.3 percent of 37,806 surveyed curb ramps complied with ADA standards.
The complaint also says the city has failed to “comply with its obligation to install and/or remediate curb ramps and sidewalks when it engages in alterations or new construction of streets, roadways, sidewalks, and other pedestrian walkways.”
Co-plaintiff Susan Goodlaxson, a wheelchair user, says there are no curb ramps on the block where she lives.
The problem isn’t just curb ramps. “The City of Baltimore’s curb ramps, sidewalks, and pedestrian right-of-way are dilapidated, disintegrating, and filled with objects such as telephone poles, trash, and trees,” the complaint reads.
That lawsuit is ongoing. But in May, a federal judge approved a settlement agreement in a class action lawsuit filed in 2019 by disability rights activists and organizations against the City of Philadelphia.
The original complaint stated that “many corners exhibit barriers such as curb ramps that are broken, steep, crumbling, or have missing or inadequate detectable warnings—a feature that assists people who are blind or have low vision to identify when the sidewalk ends in order to avoid walking into vehicular lanes. Some corners are missing curb ramps altogether so that individuals who use wheelchairs are unable to utilize the sidewalk.”
According to the complaint, the city’s plan for upgrading its curb ramps to be ADA-compliant would have taken 170 years.
The settlement agreement requires the City of Philadelphia to install or remediate at least 10,000 curb ramps over the next fifteen years. Certain benchmarks which indicate progress must be met along the way. During that same period, the city must also install accessible curb ramps where they are missing and fix those that are noncompliant, whenever a road or street with a pedestrian walkway is constructed or altered.
People who use wheelchairs aren’t the only ones still having trouble safely navigating pedestrian walkways. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled in favor of a group of blind people and the American Council of the Blind of Metropolitan Chicago after they sued the City of Chicago, also in 2019, over a lack of accessible pedestrian signals.
Because blind people can’t see “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs when they’re trying to cross a busy street, they need audio or tactile signals to tell them when it’s safe to cross. This lawsuit claimed that Chicago has 2,672 signalized traffic intersections, but only eleven of them—less than half of 1 percent—have devices that emit such signals. The lawsuit added that the city had for years installed new traffic signals or altered old ones without adding features that made them accessible for blind pedestrians.
Having the Americans with Disabilities Act, this shiny new law, on our side meant a significant battle had been won, but there were bound to be many more battles ahead.
One plaintiff said that because there were only visual crossing signals, she once stepped into the path of an oncoming bus and only avoided being hit because a nearby sighted pedestrian was able to yank her back onto the sidewalk. The bus did hit her white cane, splitting it into pieces.
Another plaintiff said she was hit by a car while crossing the street and, as a result, had to get eight staples in the back of her head.
The complaint pointed out that the city received a grant in 2015 to install accessible crossing devices for the blind at certain intersections, but those devices still weren’t in place. It added that the city has the financial resources to ensure crossing signals are accessible for blind people, but it “simply chooses not to do so.”
District Judge Elaine Bucklo, in a summary judgment, rejected the arrogant arguments of the lawyers representing City Hall that the ADA didn’t apply in this case and ordered the government to take action to correct the problem. This lawsuit is also still playing out.
In New York City, the subway system is so inaccessible that disabled folks had to sue the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). Earlier this year, a federal judge approved a settlement agreement for two class-action lawsuits to address the issue. The agreement requires the MTA to make 95 percent of the city’s subway system and Staten Island railway stations ADA-accessible, but the deadline for doing so is more than three decades away. By that time, the ADA will be sixty-five years old!
I worry that such distant deadlines will become even more distant because of examples like the way Amtrak has stubbornly disrespected the ADA. Under the act, the national passenger railway system was given twenty years to make all of its stations accessible. That deadline arrived in 2010, but a subsequent investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice found that Amtrak was still far behind in fulfilling its obligations.
Then, Amtrak reached an agreement with the department in December 2020 to avoid an ADA lawsuit. Under the agreement, over the next ten years, Amtrak must design at least 135 stations to be accessible, complete construction on ninety of those stations, and have at least forty-five more under construction. Amtrak must also establish a $2.25 million fund to provide compensation for disabled folks who have been harmed because certain stations are not accessible.
But what happens if, in ten years, Amtrak falls as woefully short of meeting its access targets as it did thirteen years ago? My guess is they’ll probably just ask for more time again—and probably receive it.
That’s what I fear may happen in New York. Thirty years from now, the MTA might follow Amtrak’s lead and say it needs another thirty years to get its act together. Once the “so sue me” strategy runs out of gas, they might decide to buy even more time by saying “so sue me again”—just like Amtrak has done.
Something similar happened when the Justice Department caught Chicago with its pants down over ADA access to the city’s polling places. In 2016, the department reviewed more than 100 polling places and concluded that many barriers existed that made them inaccessible to voters with mobility or vision disabilities. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners agreed to make every polling place in the city ADA-accessible by Election Day in November 2018.
But that deadline was extended to 2022—and the city missed it again. When a municipal election was held in Chicago last February, only one-third of the city’s polling places were fully ADA-compliant.
When it comes to public entities, the ADA isn’t the only applicable federal disability access law.
When it comes to public entities, the ADA isn’t the only applicable federal disability access law. There’s also Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in programs and activities, both public and private, that receive federal financial assistance. As the complaint against Baltimore points out, this means that the city, in order to be compliant with Section 504, was supposed to have made its public walkways accessible by June 1980, making it forty-three years behind and counting.
I attended the White House ceremony when the ADA was signed more than three decades ago. It was a celebratory atmosphere of idealistic hope. I don’t think anyone was naive enough to believe that once the ADA was a reality, full access would be achieved overnight. Having this shiny new law on our side meant a significant battle had been won, but there were bound to be many more battles ahead.
I also don’t think anybody imagined on that day that some very important public facilities would still be inaccessible decades into the future. What a huge buzzkill that would have been.