Curb Ramps Liberate Americans with
Disabilities –
And Everyone Else
By Frank Greve
McClatchy Newspapers
(MCT)
Washington, D.C. - The barricades that quadriplegic Ed Roberts and
his comrades stormed 40 years ago were a few inches high. Yet
today millions of Americans pass daily through the breaches they
created.
Curb cuts, the breaches are called. Or curb ramps.
Since 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act has required them
on new construction, renovations and wherever a city does major
street or sidewalk work.
All this curb-ramp building has helped the
world when it comes to providing public access for people with
disabilities.
"For all this country's many faults, one thing we do better than
anybody is architectural-barrier removal," said Mary Lou Breslin,
the co-founder and senior policy adviser of the Disability Rights
Education and Defense Fund, based in
estimate, more than 60 countries are trying to catch up.
Curb ramps also are a boon for bicyclists, stroller-pushers,
skateboarders and in-line skaters. They're a help, too, for
travelers with wheeled luggage and delivery truckers with hand
carts.
In fact, 9 out of 10 unencumbered pedestrians will veer off course
to take advantage of a curb ramp, according to Jim Terry, an
architect specializing in accessible design who studied pedestrian
behavior at a shopping mall in
Roberts, a quadriplegic due to polio who needed help breathing,
had none of this in mind when he enrolled at the University of
California, Berkeley, in
1962, the school's first wheelchair-using quadriplegic. His dorm -
and that of a dozen other students with severe disabilities who
joined him over the next few years - was
a hill on the eastern end of the campus.
"I had to plan my classes so that each was downhill from the
former one," recalled Michael Pachovas, who got
around the
Motorette. "At the end of the day, I'd hitch
rides with people or
ask them to push me back uphill."
Roberts and his cadre were determined to escape
and live off campus.
"They were adults, living in a hospital with nursing charts and
dating patterns being recorded (visitors, in other words), and it
was no way to live," recalled activist Ken Stein, who's now a
program administrator for the Mayor's Office on Disability in
Francisco
Roberts, by then a graduate student, was the first to escape - and
to find himself confronting obstacles to independence
at every
street corner. Unassisted wheelchair users in those days would
wheel to driveways at alleys or loading docks, then
roll along in
the street to the next driveway that tended in the right
direction. It was slow, it wasn't always possible and it was often
dangerous.
An ally of Roberts, Hale Zukas, persuaded the city of
public works department in 1969-70 to create some cement curb
ramps at intersections on
campuses had poured some curb ramps in the `50s,
thought to be the first built by a city government to promote
independent living for people in wheelchairs.
Within a year, Roberts and Berkeley's other students with
disabilities - by then politically charged enough to call
themselves the Rolling Quads - were demanding curb ramps faster
than the city's permitting procedure could provide them.
"We had a Wednesday-night poker game in those days, and a lot of
good ideas came up over those games," recalled Pachovas,
now 58, a
lifelong political activist and sometime real estate agent. "One
night, we decided to put in some curb ramps on our own after the
game. A couple of our attendants did construction work, so they
had access to cement, and I had a wheelbarrow."
They set out sometime after
just added skirts to existing curbs," Pachovas
said. "The police
threatened to arrest us, but they didn't."
The early results were crude. "You needed a running start to get
up them, and going down, you could end up on your head in the
street," Breslin said.
It didn't take long, however, to see how much the ramps enhanced
mobility.
Curb ramps are crucial to independence for people who use
wheelchairs, according to architect Bill Hecker of Hecker Design
Ltd. in
disabilities.
Most wheelchair users rely on public transportation and need to
cross several streets between their homes and the nearest mass-
transit stop, he said.
"If you take out the curb ramp, which is the key link between the
two, you've taken a huge, huge chunk out of accessibility," he
said.
The breakthrough for the national independent-living movement was
the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. It gave people with disabilities
the civil rights protections that had been conferred on
minorities.
That was a giant shift, Breslin said, away from the
be-
resourceful, kindness-of-strangers approach by which people with
disabilities always had lived. "It was a shift from `If I can't
get up the stairs to class it's my problem' to `It's
not my
problem.'"
No one knows how many curb ramps are in use today. Terry's best
guess is tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands.
It's similarly unclear how much they've cost. The simplest single
curb ramp runs about $900, according to Hecker. As a
rule, cities
put them in when it's convenient or when the Justice Department
persuades them that they must.
Among the most accessible cities, disabled-rights activists say,
are Portland, Ore.; Sacramento, Calif.; Chicago; Kansas City, Mo.;
and, of course, Berkeley, where Roberts died in 1995 at the age of
55.
The chair that he took his curbs in is now in the Smithsonian
Institution's National Museum of American History in
Outside the museum, all the corners are ramped, enabling what
Breslin described as "the seamless inclusion of
people with
disabilities into the mainstream."