Bumpy access at Westport Village, and a lot of lip

The other day I went over to Westport Village, that Universal-Studio-back-lot looking "renovation" of what used to be the Camelot Shopping Center, at Westport Rd. and Herr Lane. Looks like somebody had a bad idea for Cute. Or a Ye Trendie Village Malle, or some such.

But I digress.

In their effort to be Trendy, developers decided on -- yes! cobble stones! -- at all the intersections. See photo.



This kind of stuff falls into the realm of things that are Legally Accessible But Uncool. Years ago some wags called these kinds of intersections Podiatry Squares, for obvious reasons. But there they are -- a whole bunch of them scattered at, uh, intersections in this Westport Village creation.

And you'll see in the photo above that there are ramps, too. Below is a photo of another ramp; one that ramps directly from the parking lot to the sidewalk. Below that is a detail of the lip.

All these ramps are, I suspect, considered very Legal. Red ramps, to boot. Must be something about vision impairment. But you'll see that the ramps -- and all of them appear to be alike in this -- they all end in a big lip.



This photo doesn't really do the lip justice. It's a huge lip -- well over an inch high -- probably 2 inches.

I already know what the developers will say if called on this. "Oh, we have to make them high because we'll eventually fill in with more blacktop."

It's something I've heard before when I've called folks on ramps like this. But it's a specious argument, becuase there's no reason why adding additional blacktop to an already-flush-with-the-street ramp will make it less accessible. It's inaccessible NOW. That's the problem.

Just for the record: the parking lot does appear to be getting the requisite striping. Most of the ramps that empty into the parking lot have the diagonal "no parking" stripes at their ends. This one didn't just because they hadn't finished painting on the strips. Since there are ramps every couple of hundred feet (I said it was all very Legally Accessible!) and the others were already striped, I am not too worried about this.

I am worried about the Lips.

Lack of curb ramps force wheelchairs into street

This a.m.'s C-J brought us the Highlands/Crescent Hill Neighhborhoods weekly pullout, with its story New sidewalks coming to Brownsboro Road. And there was a photo of wheelchair user Kay Olges tooling down the very nice sidewalk, with its very nicely sloped curb ramps, along Payne in front of the Clifton Center. No complaints about these sidewalks from us.

However, it made me think about an issue that gets too little attention, and so I thought a blog entry was in order.

In Martha Elson's story, I read that Olges was

able to get to most places using the sidewalks and streets, but she said some sidewalks are uneven and more asphalt is needed at some railroad crossings.

That made me think of how wheelchair users are often forced into the streets due to the lack of curb ramps. It's a problem nationwide -- one that Elson's story did not touch on, except by inference. Maybe Olges didn't mention to Elson how dangerous that is.

But wheelchair users have been killed because of the lack of sidewalks. Stories about that here and here.