Our inaccessible streets

[Bob.Kerns]

Stealing from the Canton thread...

Originally Posted by Lily Kerns

In your letter, did you mention the problem with reaching the pedestrian light button at the crosswalk? I have no idea what the standards they have to meet are, but if it would be difficult or dangerous for someone in a wheelchair to access then it surely would be a violation....

If anyone could locate the standards that apply to these buttons, I'd appreciate it.

I have a quite an inventory of ones I'd like to complain about. Some I actually have to dismount to reach, and I think any wheelchair users would have to carry a long stick for the purpose.

Also, whoever designs the buttons themselves needs to study product usability. Some require a great amount of manual dexterity and force to push a small button INTO a small hole (much smaller than my fingers!), and you can't tell whether you've managed to push it in far enough, except to wait and see if the light changes, or to keep at it (actually painfully) until it does.

Others have these nice big buttons, but offer no real feedback if you actually pushed them far enough. I just bang on those with my fist and hope. They usually work -- but sometimes they get stuck. In fact, that's why I started banging on them -- because I encountered one that was stuck, and once I figured that out, I banged on it until it got unstuck. Now I just always bang them.

And then there's the newer electronic ones, that make a beep. They don't work as well with gloves, and present a too-small target for the fingers, but I'd still rate them as far the best of a very sorry lot.

One walk signal is hidden behind the light pole it's mounted in. Sometimes they stick them on the light pole even though the light pole is nowhere near the curb cut.

One I use regularly requires me to pass along this narrow bit of sidewalk, with curb on one side and the wall of a nice stone planter on the right, to reach the button, mounted on the traffic light pole. I negotiate this without problem -- but in a wheelchair, I'd have to back up -- and risk dropping off the curb, which would likely dump me into traffic.

I doubt wheelchair users use this spot, fortunately. The power chair users use the other side of the street, despite the narrow sidewalk and numerous driveways.

But my number one pet peeve is the pedestrian walkway over US 101, which is too narrow for anyone to pass a wheelchair, or two wheelchairs to pass -- despite cars having 4 lanes, and there being a bike lane on each side (which cross freeway onramps unprotected). Pedestrians get a walkway too narrow to walk two-abreast.

When I encounter a wheelchair there, I turn around (something they cannot do!) and wait for them to pass. If two of them ever meet (which they wouldn't know until they got closer to the top), they'd have a real problem.

Boston used to be covered with walk buttons that were non-operational -- either visibly broken, or worse, that appeared intact, but did nothing.