Before I get into the meat of today’s post, I want to make it very clear that I am not supposing that I have deep insight into what it’s like to have a severe mobility disability. At best, I gained the slightest insight into really understanding what physical access Standards mean to a person with a mobility disability.
This winter I took up skiing. I’m grateful to live in the age of YouTube University! I tried downhill skiing once just before Thanksgiving last autumn but took it up in earnest on January 2nd of this year. I wanted to learn so I ended up driving out every weekend to a local ski area. Once I started getting the hang of it, I stayed with a nearby friend and would ski all weekend. I became addicted! But as all good things do, ski season came to an end for me as temperatures warmed up. On the last day I planned to ski, I ended up on a run with kicked-up mounds of slushy wet snow. I’m a relatively good skier for being new to it, but I’m not experienced. My skis didn’t respond as I expected, and I ended up taking a tumble.
I sprained my mid-foot. This was not a disability by any means, but it did mean I had to get around on crutches for a while, something I’ve previously never had to do. My left arm does have severe nerve damage, so using crutches was not the most straight forward means of mobility for me. I learned that when you put weight on the good leg, you kind of have to fan the crutches out to the sides to reset for the step. While walking down my hallway, I noticed I was having a hard time not hitting the walls with my crutches. This hallway (48 inches) is larger than the minimum width of an accessible route (36 inches).
I’ve understood the minimum access requirements of the ADA for a long time, but mostly in an academic sense. Operable parts requirements make sense to me because they affect me directly. I’m fairly good at explaining why they are important to business owners and architects. After having limited my mobility, I began to understand accessible routes in a different way. Forty-eight inches was barely enough for me to navigate. A 36-inch-wide route would’ve been much harder to navigate and forced me to move slower than I already was. It got me to wondering if 36 inches was actually enough to serve people with disabilities. If anything, it opened my eyes to how important it is to maintain accessible features where the bare minimum access is provided. In this context, trashcans, packages, or other people would completely change the level of access through a 36-inch-wide corridor. I cannot emphasize enough that the ADA Standards are the bare minimum requirements for access and should be exceeded wherever possible.
I don’t know how you are, but my time is very important to me. It’s the only thing every day that we all start with the same amount of and that we can’t get back after it’s gone. When I was on crutches, I accepted that I was going to be slower than I normally would be and would have less time because I was spending more time ambulating. What I didn’t appreciate prior was where accessible routes deviate from the closest route. Anytime I had to go a longer distance to use an accessible route, it took a disproportionately longer amount of time to do just based on how slow I was moving. A 5-minute route when I could walk normally would take 10 minutes on crutches, but the accessible route I had to use instead might take 3 more minutes. That’s not much in isolation but repeat this several times a day every day and it adds up. Consider the nature of a permanent space and you realize the design can impact a lot of people over several years or even decades. The more that greater-than-bare-minimum access can be incorporated broadly, the more people with disabilities can get their time back (more accurately to stop robbing them of their time), directly influencing their quality of life. Who doesn’t want more time each day?
I have a newfound appreciation for the inequity of the built environment inherent in having a mobility disability. I will continue to implore that the greatest degree of access and integration be considered when designing a new project. Are the minimum requirements too minimal to be fair? I can’t say. I would encourage anyone who has a strong opinion about that question to reach out to those who have authority over physical access requirements, with the US Access Board and International Code Council being very receptive to public input.