A project in my city that resulted in adding a textured crosswalk pad, new stripes and a beg button cost $1.4M and took 3 years.
ADA does add to the costs of projects, but so does, say, safety code compliance. It's the law, and it exists for a good reason.
As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
Adding a beg button can mean upgrading or replacing the signal control module, which could mean replacing the housing if it's not large enough for the new module. (Audible-tactile buttons and controllers themselves cost $5-6k each, just for parts.)
Aside from that, the issue with ADA compliance costs isn't when a municipality or DOT pays for them. It's when they remove the crosswalk entirely because they decide compliance isn't affordable enough.
1. New construction must meet ADA requirements. 2. Old construction can remain. 3. Repairing broken old construction requires meeting ADA requirements.
So between 2 and 3 you end up with broken old construction that cannot be repaired to "what it was" because repairs must meet ADA requirements.
Each step makes sense on its own, but combined they result in something worse (in particular) even though overall it works out better.
If the new local maximum is "well, we won't fix it at all then" - the usual building code solution is property maintenance codes that mandate repairs.
Then a popular crosswalk gets upgraded before a rural crosswalk that nobody uses anyway. An easy upgrade is done before a hard upgrade. Sometimes even new stuff might be built non-compliant if, for example, there are other substantial benefits that outweigh the fine.
Just burn the fine revenue. (Burning money is the inverse of printing money, helps reduce inflation, and means nobody has an incentive to maximize fines)
They're the ones who can print them anyway. The end result is they just print less each year.
But ADA stuff is almost always handled on a local, not even state, level.
Or, just have a fixed window to achieve compliance or the building is condemned.
There are other requirements as well relating to multimodal travel depending online the funding source.
All the while, we had an increasingly dangerous intersection with no visible crosswalks and outdated signals for years.
The stupid isn’t ADA, it’s compliance activity. Cities and towns cannot afford the engineers to meet the standards, so the Federal and State governments fund projects. So there’s no framework of best practices beyond the state standards - each project is a special snowflake.
Not in the long run.
ADA just forces better designs. Retrofits are costly.
> As for the example of a minor accessibility project costing $1.4M and taking 3 years, I would suggest that there is probably more to the story that helps explain the cost or the time.
Committees, political turf wars, getting funding for the project through grants (that are complicated to apply for, that's why you need a dedicated bureaucrat to do it!). Then there's union rules since construction workers from the city are government employees.
That's half a million in employee's salaries right there and not a single concrete steps has been taken yet!
I'm not going to argue that it isn't necessary or right. But it absolutely costs more. A bathroom stall, for example, literally takes up more space, and that costs. A ramp and stairs takes up more space, materials and time and that costs.
There are things which are right to do, but disingenuous arguments to support them aren't helpful.
Oh, your road itself is at a slope greater than 3%? Oops, you can't legally do it!
It's okay to have standards. It's not okay if they're bullshit.
ADA ramp max slope should be 1:12, i.e. 8.33% which is (IMHO) reasonable.
Recommended slope for drainage on concrete and asphalt is .25-.5:12, or 1/4" to 1/2" over 1' of length.
Recommended slope for wheelchair ramps are 1-1.5:12, or 1" to 1.5" over 1' of length.
Put differently, if you live long enough, you can pretty much guarantee that you will benefit from the facilities the ADA requires at least once (and possibly for a more extended period than my daughter did).
It all looks like extra cost for little benefit until you can see it through the eyes of someone who actually needs this stuff, at which point it becomes at least a valuable and at best a life-enabling set of features.
And the chances are good that you will be one of the people, assuming you live a long and healthy life.
Sometimes the comments on this site are just insufferable.
Why haven't they been fixed? Why does the city continue to be cruel to disabled people year in and out, content to absorb the lawsuits from the few with means to bring them up? It's probably a simple case of those lawsuits being a lot cheaper than actually fixing the sidewalk to the standards the sidewalk is supposed to be fixed. This is an example of a regulation that was meant to help people (building nice sidewalks with various characteristics), but in the end the regulation was written with no understanding of the cost of these changes, or how they might stack up against the cost of doing nothing at all, so its an example of a bad regulation that should be changed so it can actually help people.
And sometimes it’s ridiculous: drive through ATMs with braille for instance. Private motel swimming pools requiring wheelchair lifts. That extreme additional cost means that many motels just won’t have a swimming pool at all — so everyone is worse off. But you can’t charge disabled people a swimming pool surcharge since that discriminatory. So it raises costs for everyone. By the way, I am referring to private building codes, not taxpayer-funded projects like sidewalks.
Passengers in the backseat.
Certainly you’ve heard of Little’s Law if you hang out in HN?