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A lot of this is undone by unofficially allowing parking in crosswalks and other routine "transgressions". The cutouts don't matter when there's a car over it. So many groups are affected by this other than wheelchair users too: parents with strollers, elderly or disabled with walkers or who simply can't lift their foot high enough to step onto a curb, young children on balance bikes or skates.

The enforcement mechanism of ADA being, literally, "sue us" is an absolutely massive barrier that makes its practical efficacy a fraction of what you'd think it is based on reading the rules.

I have spent four years, typically ~2 months a year between first complaint and it actually getting acted upon, getting Somerville to cut overgrowth from its own construction site that completely block a sidewalk that is used by hundreds of people per day (there is no sidewalk at all on the other side).

You couldn't use the sidewalk anyway as it is not ADA compliant in the slightest (random light posts in the middle of a half width sidewalk with tons of cracks and holes). But at least it should be vaguely passable...

Meanwhile literally 100 feet away they managed to redesign and repave an entire highway onramp without hiring a groundskeeper for their own property.

I hate having to bring up the ADA as the reason the city should respect pedestrians. They spent how much money on that highway onramp but can't be bothered to make the frontage on property it owns usable by pedestrians?

Highways are managed by the state DOT, not the city.

Oh boy, do I know... they say it's a city thing because the site is owned by the city or used for city construction or something. It's convoluted as you would expect. 311 and the state DOT disagree about who is responsible for no reason a mere citizen can navigate. It's a long and boring post.

An aside in any case.

A completely blocked and nearly useless sidewalk shouldn't be a thing that requires a resident to file a complaint just the right way to get fixed. Especially when it's in an easily visible area. Something being "compliant" isn't enough, and even publicly managed sites aren't necessarily compliant (and shouldn't take a lawyer to fix).

It's not asking a lot for a site run by a construction company to find a groundskeeper for a few hours a year without figuring out just the right way to complain first. When the same sites were owned by a private company it went without saying.

Well the old famous pizza places are not accessible in the slightest. Basically anything super freaking old is a lost cause unless you magically have room to make the bathrooms bigger or put an extension on the storefront, etc. I'm from the South, and it also shocked me how cars in Chicago would basically inch directly up to where you're walking, like they're just gonna run over you if you stopped, even if pedestrians technically have the green to cross. And they could see we were going slower because we're pushing a wheelchair! People talk crap on the South and how we drive, but at least we usually slow down when someone is crossing. (I can't vouch for Florida, but most of Florida doesn't count as Southern anyway.)

It's easy to take the braille in elevators or lights on fire alarms for granted, but thanks for pointing out how good it is that we have them.

> and it also shocked me how cars in Chicago would basically inch directly up to where you're walking, like they're just gonna run over you if you stopped, even if pedestrians technically have the green to cross.

I just spent the last week in downtown Chicago and in this regard I didn't find it any worse than the downtown areas of other major cities. Not saying it is acceptable but Chicago is not an outlier.

I kind of wonder if we're not solving a lot of these problems in the wrong place. We passed a law that requires buildings to change, but meanwhile we have the technology to make "wheelchairs" that can climb stairs. Something with a continuous track or whatever else human ingenuity can devise.

That would cost money, but how could it possibly cost as much as modifying every building everywhere? A wheelchair ramp is thousands of dollars. An elevator is hundreds of thousands. A person in a wheelchair might encounter a thousand distinct sets of stairs in a year but the median set of stairs doesn't encounter that number of distinct people in a wheelchair.

More importantly, there are stairs in places we're not going to do anything about it, like old buildings and private homes. And there are accessibility devices that become inaccessible, e.g. an elevator that can't be used because the power is out or the building is on fire. A solution that still works in those cases is better.

As far as I can tell we got stuck with the existing one because of politics. The per-person cost of a ramp at a large high volume business is negligible because it has so much traffic, so much so that they'd install one regardless. The real cost is putting them in every small shop and low traffic area. But then you have no opposition from large businesses to a law requiring them because it puts a disproportionate cost on their smaller competitors. Whereas a tax that paid for more capable "wheelchairs" would sensibly be paid mostly by those large companies, and then they object.

I once had a job where I listened to calls to a major US health insurance carrier. The amount of grief that people (especially retirees on privately administered medicare) go through to get a claim for a new wheelchair approved can be enormous. If we want to give disabled people better & more expensive medical equipment as a substitute for accessible buildings, we need to fix the system that is depriving many of new or replacement versions of the "dumb" mobility aids that are in wide use today.

Went through this with parents, ended up paying for a wheelchair for $500 myself from the manufacturer. I hate Medicare denying disabled stroke patients with a passion now.

But this is just the politics again. If a government program is paying tax money to people with a particular condition then they should just have a table that says how much money it's expected to cost and give you that money to use for whatever you want. Presumably you'll use it to buy an accessibility device, because you need one, which is why you got the money -- but you shouldn't be excluded from using it for something that functions as an accessibility device even if it isn't on some specific list, or devising your own and using the money to buy components.

Only if they did that there wouldn't be any middle men making rules for who gets denied or which company's products you have to buy, so they would be exposed to competitive pressure and have to make better stuff for slimmer margins. Which the existing system is designed to prevent, because politics.

Those tractor wheelchairs are not a fits-all solution! For one, they're huge and heavy. For another, I would assume they won't work well on irregular stairways or antique stairways.

Honestly, I'll make an insane hot take here: I think historic/antique buildings that can't be made ADA compliant shouldn't be used for anything important. Or rather, that they should be modified to accommodate.

History is important TO A DEGREE. Helping human beings feel more a part of society is more important.

> For one, they're huge and heavy.

So make one that isn't. There is nothing in them that has to be made out of depleted uranium.

> For another, I would assume they won't work well on irregular stairways or antique stairways.

How is that any worse than the status quo? If you have something that can navigate stairways then it will work on some of the structures which are old and currently inaccessible, as opposed to none of them as it is now.

> Honestly, I'll make an insane hot take here: I think historic/antique buildings that can't be made ADA compliant shouldn't be used for anything important. Or rather, that they should be modified to accommodate.

In many cases this is impossible without taking a wrecking ball to the existing structure and even when it is possible it will commonly be prohibitively expensive because it requires extensive bespoke professional engineering instead of off the shelf commodity products. You're essentially asking for all the old buildings to be torn down, which would not only be the destruction of history but have an extensive economic cost and exacerbate the existing real estate shortage.

It might literally be less expensive to give everyone in a wheelchair a personal flying car.

Physical changes to building codes and infrastructure have benefited not just those on wheelchairs, but just about everyone else with a wheeled thing for any other purpose. Parents pushing prams and strollers, people moving bikes into parking spots, carrying groceries with wheeled carriers, using mobility scooters, etc.

As others have mentioned: no, it’s the right tack; permanent changes to the built world benefit many and survive whatever byzantine rules might come in place to receiving high-tech wheelchairs from insurance or otherwise.

Commercial buildings have had loading docks and freight elevators since long before the ADA. There wouldn't be a law prohibiting ramps or curb cuts in any place where the value exceeds the cost. But then it would be engineers and competitive pressure doing the math instead of lawyers and politicians.

> permanent changes to the built world

None of that is permanent. Most buildings never make it to 100 years. The real estate consumed is a continuous cost. There is also a massive, ongoing cost to making new construction more expensive, because it increases housing scarcity and transfers wealth to landlords.

> benefit many and survive whatever byzantine rules might come in place to receiving high-tech wheelchairs from insurance or otherwise.

It seems extremely unlikely that in any non-apocalyptic future the technology will cease to be available in the market regardless of how dysfunctional insurance is. The least convenient plausible scenario is that you have to pay money for it. And the entire point is that on net this will be less money than people are having to pay for what's happening now, in the form of high rents.

By the way, those ramps also benefit people with children (pushchairs).

Many of the subway stations in NYC still don't have elevators, and when they do they're usually far from the platform, slow, and smelly.

I'm not even in a wheel chair, although I do have foot and nerve issues that can make stairs rather treacherous so I usually avoid them when possible. Like, I live in a 3 story house with stairs, and it's fine, but on possibly slick concrete or tile, with many other people around me (usually going faster)...that's something I avoid when possible.

I've noticed this as well. It depends on where you live, but in Brooklyn, almost none of the subway stations are wheelchair accessible. Buses are, and there are many free transfer options from the subway into the bus network, but in my experience living in NYC the buses are very unreliable. You can get to where you're going but half the time the bus you need will not arrive.

Just for fun I looked at a couple subway lines in Brooklyn. Very few wheelchair accessible stops:

- F train: 3 of its 22 stops

- G train: 2 of its 19 stops (a historically neglected line, but still I'm surprised to see this so low)

- A train: 3 of its 17 stops

... in fact, lets play a game. Here's a map I made of part of Brooklyn. The stars represent stops that are not wheelchair accessible. Can you find the stops that don't have a star? https://imgur.com/a/8PdzrOK

When I visited this year I never got out of lower/midtown Manhattan and it was 50/50 at best.

> And the sad thing is, in this respect Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US

Being a “progressive” city isn’t really correlated with being disability friendly. New York is terrible for disabilities. Many walkable and high dense areas are also terrible for them.

Like it or not, suburbia with giant parking lots, dedicated disabled spaces, wheelchair ramps, etc is about the best access you can get (assuming you can drive a vehicle and have one).

Or, new construction in general is more disability friendly. Historic construction isn't, and usually only has to update on renovations.

Plenty of new construction in New York that is still miserable. Show me a city famous for its dense walkability that’s considered disability friendly.

As I understand it, the ADA is one of those occasions where the US government leads the world in protecting its citizens.

> Chicago is less bad than a lot of other towns and cities in the US and way less bad than many (most?) cities in other countries, including many that are much more progressive than the US

You are seriously… I don’t know what to say. I live in Turkey. The treatment in Chicago is something unheard of. I cannot imagine this behavior outside of a tech dystopia, and apparently this is what West is now. Funny to see you think physical accessibility, wheelchair platforms etc. are more important than traditional bonds of family and community to support disabled people. Thank God we’re still not that progressive.

My city has been on a curb cut rampage recently. Pretty much every single corner, whether in a suburban neighborhood or downtown, has been ripped out and replaced with an ADA ramp that is bright yellow with these bumps on it.