Marty Walsh launches review, vows sidewalk mends
(Boston, MA, 05/26/14) Pedestrians walks pasts a damaged section of sidewalk along the Freedom Trail on School Street in Boston on Monday, May 26, 2014. Staff photo by Christopher Evans.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Detail of digital level registering a 19 degree grade on the sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Digital level registering a 19 degree grade on the sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014 as subject Eric McCall drives his wheelchair tilted. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Eric McCall of Boston drives his wheelchair along a tilted sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
INFRASTRUCTURE FAIL: Eric McCall of Boston, above, steers his wheelchair along a tilted sidewalk on Summer Street.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Eric McCall of Boston drives his wheelchair along the slanted sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
(052614 Boston, Ma) The poor shape of the sidewalks on Beach St. is one of the several Boston sidewalks that is on file at the Architectural Access Board. Staff photo by Jim Mahoney
INFRASTRUCTURE FAIL: Eric McCall of Boston, above, steers his wheelchair along a tilted sidewalk on Summer Street. Author Norman Bridwell, left, uses a cane to negotiate 'missing bricks' on Charles Street. Cracked pavement lines the sidewalk on Beach Street, below, in Chinatown.
INFRASTRUCTURE FAIL: Eric McCall of Boston, above, steers his wheelchair along a tilted sidewalk near 281 Summer Street. Missing bricks on Charles Street, left, make walks treacherous. The poor shape of the sidewalks on Beach Street, below, has been targeted as one of the several inaccessible sidewalks in a report on file at the Architectural Access Board.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Eric McCall of Boston drives his wheelchair along the tilted sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Eric McCall of Boston drives his wheelchair along the sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
Pedestrians walk through a section of broken sidewalk along Bromfield Street in Boston.
Norman Bridwell, author of Clifford the Big Red Dog series, uses a cane to walk along Charles Street in Boston.
The poor shape of the sidewalks on Beach St. is one of the several Boston sidewalks that is on file at the Architectural Access Board.
A digital level registering a 19 degree grade on the sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014 as subject Eric McCall drives his wheelchair on the tilted grade.
Subject Eric McCall of Boston drives his wheelchair along the sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014 showing the extreme tilted grade of the surface.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Eric McCall of Boston talks about the trouble of traveling on the tilted sidewalks in his wheelchair near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
(Boston,MA 05/23/14) Shot shows pedestrians walking the tilted sidewalk near 281 Summer St. on Friday, May 23, 2014. Staff photo by Patrick Whittemore.
By Richard Weir |
PUBLISHED: May 27, 2014 at 12:00 am | UPDATED: November 18, 2018 at 12:00 am
The Walsh administration is launching a massive survey of the city's roughly 1,700 miles of sidewalks, as a Herald review found the city's pedestrian ways to be a "minefield" of heaving, sloping, cracked concrete, brick and cobblestone responsible for dozens of payouts to people who have fallen.
With gaping chasms in Chinatown, heel-catching gaps on Beacon Hill, steeply pitched slabs of concrete in Southie and bad curb cuts all over town, it's like a war zone for urban walkers as well as the wheelchair-bound.
"It's a minefield of missing bricks," children's author Norman Bridwell told the Herald yesterday as he walked with a cane on upscale Charles Street.
City Hall, faced with a series of violations from the state's Architectural Access Board over curb cuts for wheelchairs — on top of the hazardous walking conditions — acknowledges the problem.
"You can't have a city that is not accessible to people with disabilities. It's not fair. I think that there are a lot people who have problems getting around our city and they shouldn't," said Mayor Martin J. Walsh, who is making sidewalk accessibility a top priority. "If we are to promote ourselves as a walkable city, we need to make sure we are walkable to everyone."
It's not just the disabled who find city sidewalks treacherous. The city has paid out $144,000 in the past three years to settle personal injury claims for sidewalk falls, according to the city's Legal Department.
Public Works Commissioner Michael Dennehy next month will kick off a massive sidewalk condition survey — the first since 2009. Sidewalks will be graded on their slopes, cracks, heaving, settling, materials, dimensions and conformance to city codes.
"The short-term plan is to come with a base level of what the sidewalks look like in Boston," Dennehy said, adding the goal for the DPW crew who will walk each linear foot of city sidewalk will be to create an "engineering assessment of the sidewalk infrastructure."
The sidewalk along the south side of Summer Street near Melcher Street is just one of dozens that pose a hazard to the disabled, either because their cross slope — the angle that water drains to the gutter — exceeds allowable pitches, or they lack curb cuts or have loose bricks that jut dangerously upward.
With a cross slope that ranges up to 19 percent — 2 percent is the allowable grade — the steeply banked pathway forced Neighborhood Access Group advocate John Kelly and four other wheelchair users to ride in the middle of a traffic lane for several blocks last fall.
"It was definitely a wheelchair choo-choo train," he said of his group as they headed from South Station to the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, which in September hosts the Abilities Expo, an annual conference that showcases technology designed to make life easier for disabled people.
"The sidewalk there should be condemned. It's so dangerous. The slope is so great, you just tip over. If you are in a manual wheelchair, you can end up in the gutter. It's like a skateboard test range," said Kelly, 56, of Fenway. "When they put in the convention center, they should have made it an accessible route from South Station. It never occurred to them that we should be able to get there."
According to the city, as many as 5,000 of the city's 23,000 pedestrian ramps, or curb cuts, are out of compliance.
Karen Schneiderman of the Boston Center of Independent Living said while the Menino administration tried to "aggressively" tackle the problem, the overall condition of city sidewalks "remains" lousy because of years of neglect.
"The city is playing catch-up," she said. "Wheelchairs and canes can get stuck in places where the bricks pop up or have worn out. People's ability to navigate a city is more important than the historical aspect."
"There is still a lot of work to be done," added John Winske, president of the Disability Policy Consortium.
Christopher Evans contributed to this report.
Richard Weir
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