Indeed. I'm familiar with these styles of curb ramps as they go up in every newer neighborhood. Gemini (AI) breaks down the cost at about $4000-$8000 each, with less than half that being materials. No way this should cost anything remotely near 50K.
It doesn't cost that much in a city with a halfway competent government, which wouldn't describe Los Angeles. People keep trying to turn this into an ADA issue when it's an issue of basic government competency.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
I’m a CIP project manager. I’d say up to $7,500 or so. California may be more expensive but $50k is crazy and likely not true. Also HC ramps don’t take 9-12 months to design and construct EACH. That’s not how it works.
But I agree ADA requirements are excessive and cause public works departments to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.
It’s also environmentally bad causing the removal and replacement of a lot of concrete. Existing ramps should be grandfathered up to the last 20 years or so. Ramps are sometimes removed because of minor changes to the specs. That’s dumb and wasteful.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Because EVERYTHING that government does costs that much, by design. Overlooking the rules about hiring minority contractors and DEI this and that and the rest of the nonsense to causes delays and boosts costs, the approach with government is totally backward. They create the budget and THEN look for the projects. Its the same with every level of government. Congress passes a fifty gazillion dollar "infrastructure bill" and then runs around with sacks full of money with comical dollar signs drawn on the side like a cartoon, looking for people to take their money in return for "promises" to build things. How much infrastructure have you seen in the last four years since Joe Biden "fixed" everything with even more spending? The process is backward. Imagine your boss coming into the office and saying "hey, here is six hundred thousand dollars, why don't you look into buying us four new office chairs...."
What is it with you people's endless whining about DEI? Did DEI not do your laundry? Did it make fun of you? This is a problem other cities don't have. It's not caused by Black people. Maybe your MAGA hat is on too tight?
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
It's interesting that while a 1 minute google search shows you that $50K is 5 times as much as the cost in NYC, which has much more dense under street infrastructure and famously high construction costs, the author of this article didn't bother to do that research. I guess LA's unusually high costs would undercut the message that ADA is bad government regulation.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
So they got the ramps done for $3K apiece instead of $50K? That certainly sounds like a much more reasonable figure. I'm curious where that $50K price tag comes from.
I had posted someplace earlier that this could be the mis-application of a complicated one-off curb cut to a larger construction project where the cost is incremental. That is probably part of it in published data that says the curb cuts themselves add $x to the cost of a construction project in the way those numbers were presented.
We may also be trying to compare a city cost estimate - which has to be burdened with design, community outreach, overhead, risk, etc. - to project as-built cost paid to a contractor all by itself.
Begin lecture: City costs on top of construction are direct staff and also contain overhead on overhead, because design, inspection and other services required during the design/construction phase are paid to consultants. Multiplier on the direct salary paid to an individual consultant is typically 2.5 - 3 (often even more for smaller cities that don’t have the knowledge base to effectively negotiate). It’s very difficult to compare the cost of a public employee to that of a consultant employee. Consultants have to follow federal accounting standards: public entities don’t report their overheads in the same way.
We like to drag public entities for their lack of institutional knowledge, bloated costs, and overcomplicated and dysfunctional bureaucracies. But a lot of criticism aimed at the public sector is pretty reductive.
The risk transfer to consulting companies, staff costs that sunset with project completion, and ability to fire non-performing individuals from your project are advantages for public entities. Disadvantage is found in the time it takes to hire those consultants, cost to manage the contracts and paying overheads, and especially the loss of institutional knowledge (this one doesn’t come with numbers. It just comes to bite you at some point).
IMO we have made things way too complicated and expensive for the public sector. The abundance people have started with environmental analysis costs that have little to do with actual environmental protection. I expect this conversation to look at other cost elements.
I wish I understood how to even make the cost comparison between staff and consultant, but one big cost element is that public entities don’t usually consider pension liabilities as overhead for their employees. And while consultants make higher direct salaries, they don’t get pensions.
I’m not weighing in with an opinion on those public sector pensions, only noting that those commitments have been made. Also not saying here that consultants are overpaid. Only trying to provide information about things that are not well understood. End lecture :)
NYC has 6,300 miles of streets; Los Angeles has 25,000 miles of streets; and there are requirements for low-carbon sourcing of parts, cement, ramps, and installation. It is death by a thousand clerk mouse clicks.
Ha, you are correct. My error. Thank you for pointing it out.
According to the urban land institute that are about the same. However, LA City has 28,000 lane miles, and NYC has 19,000 lane miles. NYC has good public transit, and LA has crap public transit. NYC Public transit ridership per weekday is 3.4 to 4.6 million, LA 893,000.
Well its almost as if the City of Los Angeles as a whole does not work, and almost as if the Americans with Disabilities Act had all sorts of unforeseen consequences that make business and governance impossible? Who would have ever thought it... But at least the people who passed the law got to feel good about themselves for "helping"... Also, unaddressed in this story is the fact that Los Angeles is not paving roads for the same reason it is not doing ANYTHING else, which is that the entire budget for those sorts of functions is going to pay the retired teachers and public sector union members using Enron-style accounting gimmicks so nobody notices. At the same time they continue to pass bond resolutions sold to the public as funding future projects when in fact the funds are actually being used to pay for present and past promises that were never funded. The entire city and state are beyond bankrupt with trillions of dollars in unfunded promises through a bankrupt pension plan and bonds that will never be repaid. The only way out for the city, the state and the federal government is bankruptcy and a return to their Constitutionally mandated minimal functions. [Sidenote the picture at the top of the story of the beach at sundown is NOT Los Angeles, it is Manhattan Beach a much nicer and well run city.]
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
The pic heading up the article is not the City of LA but rather Manhattan Beach.
The City of LA is broke. The homeless services industrial complex sucks up all the money.
“Los Angeles spends roughly 4-5 times more on homeless services ($900 million to $1 billion) than on street maintenance and improvements (approximately $210 million for StreetsLA, though this figure may be lower with recent cuts). This disparity occurs even as Los Angeles already ranks as the 3rd worst road quality in the nation of major cities”
The figures are for the 2025-2026 budget of about $14 billion.
I always thought a good compromise would be to concentrate accessibility efforts in areas with high foot traffic and particular neighborhoods where disabled people cluster or where there are amenities which appeal to disabled people.
This is an interesting approach and could possibly be accomplished under the existing ADA. I don’t know about state law but there may be federal preemption anyways.
Indeed, the ADA does require that improvements are triggered by “alteration.” It allows for “equivalent facilitation,” and not being a lawyer, I don’t know how broad this is, but I have experience with its use in very specific cases: the idea is the person still gets the same access to a facility even if the letter of the law is not met. A waiver must be granted by the regulatory body.
Applying for an equivalent facilitation waiver on a citywide basis seems like a discussion that should be had. And it sounds similar to the “key stations” relief given to transits when the ADA was new (1990).
Nobody wants to give a city like LA, which claims a curb ramp costs 50 grand when done within a big job, any kind of relief. But if we could learn how to have these discussions as a people and work toward positive change, we could really make a lot of progress for those who don’t walk/walk with difficulty, and very quickly. Disabled people often live in the more dense parts of our cities because being reliant on Medicaid/SSI limits people’s ability to build wealth and afford adaptive personal transportation.
In my opinion, another change that is needed to the ADA is a specific enforcement mechanism. Right now there isn’t one and “enforcement” is reactive, based on lawsuits against the entity that owns the infrastructure. In some places suing owners for well-intended improvements is a cottage industry. This is a waste of time, money and taxpayer dollars that could be spent making wider improvements.
Cities often react to judgements the way LA is here, with wiggly BS seeking to avoid another lawsuit. We need a do-over to make cities do the right thing, which also requires predictability and protection of tax dollars meant for community benefit.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
They shouldn't *have* to comply with the ADA, because it shouldn't exist, because cities should be able to decide for themselves through the democratic process whether and how to provide for the needs of disabled people.
Sounds like the problem here is less with the ADA and more with the fact that it costs literally 10X more to install an ADA ramp in LA than in other cities.
One of my sons lives in the Carthay Square neighborhood of central Los Angeles, which is a designated Historic District. Although the homes are valued in the millions of dollars, the sidewalks are in very poor condition due to the growth of roots of mature trees planted adjacent to the sidewalks more than 70 years ago. During a visit to my son some years ago I tripped over one of the numerous major sidewalk irregularities and badly sprained my left leg where it joins my hip. The pain from this injury lasted well over a year. I do not understand why installation of a curb ramp should cost much more than that of a regular corner curb. The amount of labor and materials involved in both installations should be comparable.
I’m not seeing the “legal minefield” here - mostly seems like they don’t want to use taxpayer dollars for a basic government function. Agreed the compliance process seems to take too long, but that’s not a legal issue.
All theft, no services. It’s not “gubmint”, its a RICO racket. Pretty much running unopposed in all the blue state dictatorships, cemented by institutionalized vote fraud.
Because the article was published in January, when it mentions “last year” I believe it means 2024. The new Federal rules were issued 18 December 2024 and the rules referenced were published in mid-2023.
When the Fed engineers revise their HC Ramp details then most HC Ramps in the US are now non-compliant. This has happened three times since 2010 and as recently as 2023. So the majority of ramps in the US are now out of spec and need replacement. A new paving project triggers the replacement. Do nothing and you don’t have to remove and replace older ramps.
That $50K/per ramp is ridiculous. NYC, which has much more dense infrastructure under streets and is infamous for high public construction costs is 1/5 of that.
I'd be interested to read an investigation of why the curb ramps cost so much.
Indeed. I'm familiar with these styles of curb ramps as they go up in every newer neighborhood. Gemini (AI) breaks down the cost at about $4000-$8000 each, with less than half that being materials. No way this should cost anything remotely near 50K.
It doesn't cost that much in a city with a halfway competent government, which wouldn't describe Los Angeles. People keep trying to turn this into an ADA issue when it's an issue of basic government competency.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/docs/default-source/scottsdaleaz/accessibility/ada-documents/draft-ada-self-evaluation-and-transition-plan.pdf?sfvrsn=cf164102_1#:~:text=Highlights%20of%20ADA%20efforts%20for,a%20cost%20of%20%24232%2C700%20and
This needs to be higher.
So in other words, $3233 per ramp vs 50K for Los Angeles.
Thank you for this and for your advocacy, sir.
I’m a CIP project manager. I’d say up to $7,500 or so. California may be more expensive but $50k is crazy and likely not true. Also HC ramps don’t take 9-12 months to design and construct EACH. That’s not how it works.
But I agree ADA requirements are excessive and cause public works departments to do things they otherwise wouldn’t.
It’s also environmentally bad causing the removal and replacement of a lot of concrete. Existing ramps should be grandfathered up to the last 20 years or so. Ramps are sometimes removed because of minor changes to the specs. That’s dumb and wasteful.
By the time Joe, John, Jill and Frank have lined their pockets, You could build a house rather than a curb ramp!
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/docs/default-source/scottsdaleaz/accessibility/ada-documents/draft-ada-self-evaluation-and-transition-plan.pdf?sfvrsn=cf164102_1#:~:text=Highlights%20of%20ADA%20efforts%20for,a%20cost%20of%20%24232%2C700%20and
you can literally buy cheap rubber ones and drill them into the ground. they literally sell them on Amazon.
Those are truncated domes not HC Ramps. And if you’re talking rubber ramps those are rubbish.
Because EVERYTHING that government does costs that much, by design. Overlooking the rules about hiring minority contractors and DEI this and that and the rest of the nonsense to causes delays and boosts costs, the approach with government is totally backward. They create the budget and THEN look for the projects. Its the same with every level of government. Congress passes a fifty gazillion dollar "infrastructure bill" and then runs around with sacks full of money with comical dollar signs drawn on the side like a cartoon, looking for people to take their money in return for "promises" to build things. How much infrastructure have you seen in the last four years since Joe Biden "fixed" everything with even more spending? The process is backward. Imagine your boss coming into the office and saying "hey, here is six hundred thousand dollars, why don't you look into buying us four new office chairs...."
What is it with you people's endless whining about DEI? Did DEI not do your laundry? Did it make fun of you? This is a problem other cities don't have. It's not caused by Black people. Maybe your MAGA hat is on too tight?
Many cities manage to do this for far less than $50k a ramp. This seems like an LA specific problem
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/docs/default-source/scottsdaleaz/accessibility/ada-documents/draft-ada-self-evaluation-and-transition-plan.pdf?sfvrsn=cf164102_1#:~:text=Highlights%20of%20ADA%20efforts%20for,a%20cost%20of%20%24232%2C700%20and
It's interesting that while a 1 minute google search shows you that $50K is 5 times as much as the cost in NYC, which has much more dense under street infrastructure and famously high construction costs, the author of this article didn't bother to do that research. I guess LA's unusually high costs would undercut the message that ADA is bad government regulation.
ADA is a national law. Yet only LA has this problem? Something doesn’t add up here. In New York, roads are fully repaved all the time.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/docs/default-source/scottsdaleaz/accessibility/ada-documents/draft-ada-self-evaluation-and-transition-plan.pdf?sfvrsn=cf164102_1#:~:text=Highlights%20of%20ADA%20efforts%20for,a%20cost%20of%20%24232%2C700%20and
So they got the ramps done for $3K apiece instead of $50K? That certainly sounds like a much more reasonable figure. I'm curious where that $50K price tag comes from.
I had posted someplace earlier that this could be the mis-application of a complicated one-off curb cut to a larger construction project where the cost is incremental. That is probably part of it in published data that says the curb cuts themselves add $x to the cost of a construction project in the way those numbers were presented.
We may also be trying to compare a city cost estimate - which has to be burdened with design, community outreach, overhead, risk, etc. - to project as-built cost paid to a contractor all by itself.
Begin lecture: City costs on top of construction are direct staff and also contain overhead on overhead, because design, inspection and other services required during the design/construction phase are paid to consultants. Multiplier on the direct salary paid to an individual consultant is typically 2.5 - 3 (often even more for smaller cities that don’t have the knowledge base to effectively negotiate). It’s very difficult to compare the cost of a public employee to that of a consultant employee. Consultants have to follow federal accounting standards: public entities don’t report their overheads in the same way.
We like to drag public entities for their lack of institutional knowledge, bloated costs, and overcomplicated and dysfunctional bureaucracies. But a lot of criticism aimed at the public sector is pretty reductive.
The risk transfer to consulting companies, staff costs that sunset with project completion, and ability to fire non-performing individuals from your project are advantages for public entities. Disadvantage is found in the time it takes to hire those consultants, cost to manage the contracts and paying overheads, and especially the loss of institutional knowledge (this one doesn’t come with numbers. It just comes to bite you at some point).
IMO we have made things way too complicated and expensive for the public sector. The abundance people have started with environmental analysis costs that have little to do with actual environmental protection. I expect this conversation to look at other cost elements.
I wish I understood how to even make the cost comparison between staff and consultant, but one big cost element is that public entities don’t usually consider pension liabilities as overhead for their employees. And while consultants make higher direct salaries, they don’t get pensions.
I’m not weighing in with an opinion on those public sector pensions, only noting that those commitments have been made. Also not saying here that consultants are overpaid. Only trying to provide information about things that are not well understood. End lecture :)
No one is blaming disabled people. Stop flopping.
Yeah, this seems like a fun story but "Los Angeles local government still dysfunctional" explains just as much.
NYC has 6,300 miles of streets; Los Angeles has 25,000 miles of streets; and there are requirements for low-carbon sourcing of parts, cement, ramps, and installation. It is death by a thousand clerk mouse clicks.
My source told me your figure is for Los Angeles County, whereas the City has a similar number of streets as New York (albeit for a lower population)
Ha, you are correct. My error. Thank you for pointing it out.
According to the urban land institute that are about the same. However, LA City has 28,000 lane miles, and NYC has 19,000 lane miles. NYC has good public transit, and LA has crap public transit. NYC Public transit ridership per weekday is 3.4 to 4.6 million, LA 893,000.
Well its almost as if the City of Los Angeles as a whole does not work, and almost as if the Americans with Disabilities Act had all sorts of unforeseen consequences that make business and governance impossible? Who would have ever thought it... But at least the people who passed the law got to feel good about themselves for "helping"... Also, unaddressed in this story is the fact that Los Angeles is not paving roads for the same reason it is not doing ANYTHING else, which is that the entire budget for those sorts of functions is going to pay the retired teachers and public sector union members using Enron-style accounting gimmicks so nobody notices. At the same time they continue to pass bond resolutions sold to the public as funding future projects when in fact the funds are actually being used to pay for present and past promises that were never funded. The entire city and state are beyond bankrupt with trillions of dollars in unfunded promises through a bankrupt pension plan and bonds that will never be repaid. The only way out for the city, the state and the federal government is bankruptcy and a return to their Constitutionally mandated minimal functions. [Sidenote the picture at the top of the story of the beach at sundown is NOT Los Angeles, it is Manhattan Beach a much nicer and well run city.]
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/docs/default-source/scottsdaleaz/accessibility/ada-documents/draft-ada-self-evaluation-and-transition-plan.pdf?sfvrsn=cf164102_1#:~:text=Highlights%20of%20ADA%20efforts%20for,a%20cost%20of%20%24232%2C700%20and
The pic heading up the article is not the City of LA but rather Manhattan Beach.
The City of LA is broke. The homeless services industrial complex sucks up all the money.
“Los Angeles spends roughly 4-5 times more on homeless services ($900 million to $1 billion) than on street maintenance and improvements (approximately $210 million for StreetsLA, though this figure may be lower with recent cuts). This disparity occurs even as Los Angeles already ranks as the 3rd worst road quality in the nation of major cities”
The figures are for the 2025-2026 budget of about $14 billion.
Want affordability? Repeal the ADA.
I always thought a good compromise would be to concentrate accessibility efforts in areas with high foot traffic and particular neighborhoods where disabled people cluster or where there are amenities which appeal to disabled people.
This is an interesting approach and could possibly be accomplished under the existing ADA. I don’t know about state law but there may be federal preemption anyways.
Indeed, the ADA does require that improvements are triggered by “alteration.” It allows for “equivalent facilitation,” and not being a lawyer, I don’t know how broad this is, but I have experience with its use in very specific cases: the idea is the person still gets the same access to a facility even if the letter of the law is not met. A waiver must be granted by the regulatory body.
Applying for an equivalent facilitation waiver on a citywide basis seems like a discussion that should be had. And it sounds similar to the “key stations” relief given to transits when the ADA was new (1990).
Nobody wants to give a city like LA, which claims a curb ramp costs 50 grand when done within a big job, any kind of relief. But if we could learn how to have these discussions as a people and work toward positive change, we could really make a lot of progress for those who don’t walk/walk with difficulty, and very quickly. Disabled people often live in the more dense parts of our cities because being reliant on Medicaid/SSI limits people’s ability to build wealth and afford adaptive personal transportation.
In my opinion, another change that is needed to the ADA is a specific enforcement mechanism. Right now there isn’t one and “enforcement” is reactive, based on lawsuits against the entity that owns the infrastructure. In some places suing owners for well-intended improvements is a cottage industry. This is a waste of time, money and taxpayer dollars that could be spent making wider improvements.
Cities often react to judgements the way LA is here, with wiggly BS seeking to avoid another lawsuit. We need a do-over to make cities do the right thing, which also requires predictability and protection of tax dollars meant for community benefit.
I'm Mark Willits, the plaintiff in the lawsuit Willits vs LA. My 2017 lawsuit settlement requires the city of LA to install curb ramps and fix sidewalk obstructions across the entire city. This is yet another bullshit excuse the city of LA is using to not comply with ADA & California law.
I now live in to Scottsdale. Here's a quote from the city of Scottsdale website.
• In 2018, Street operations completed 1,146 ADA ramp upgrades at a cost of
$3,705,374, completed 179 locations of sidewalk repairs at a cost of $232,700 and
completed 62 paving projects or 1,909,843 square yards of pavement treatment
Don't blame people with disabilities for city of LA incompetence and neglect.
Https://www.scottsdaleaz.gov/docs/default-source/scottsdaleaz/accessibility/ada-documents/draft-ada-self-evaluation-and-transition-plan.pdf?sfvrsn=cf164102_1#:~:text=Highlights%20of%20ADA%20efforts%20for,a%20cost%20of%20%24232%2C700%20and
They shouldn't *have* to comply with the ADA, because it shouldn't exist, because cities should be able to decide for themselves through the democratic process whether and how to provide for the needs of disabled people.
Sounds like the problem here is less with the ADA and more with the fact that it costs literally 10X more to install an ADA ramp in LA than in other cities.
Why don’t they just declare themselves an ADA sanctuary city and refuse to acknowledge federal law?
One of my sons lives in the Carthay Square neighborhood of central Los Angeles, which is a designated Historic District. Although the homes are valued in the millions of dollars, the sidewalks are in very poor condition due to the growth of roots of mature trees planted adjacent to the sidewalks more than 70 years ago. During a visit to my son some years ago I tripped over one of the numerous major sidewalk irregularities and badly sprained my left leg where it joins my hip. The pain from this injury lasted well over a year. I do not understand why installation of a curb ramp should cost much more than that of a regular corner curb. The amount of labor and materials involved in both installations should be comparable.
I’m not seeing the “legal minefield” here - mostly seems like they don’t want to use taxpayer dollars for a basic government function. Agreed the compliance process seems to take too long, but that’s not a legal issue.
All theft, no services. It’s not “gubmint”, its a RICO racket. Pretty much running unopposed in all the blue state dictatorships, cemented by institutionalized vote fraud.
Because the article was published in January, when it mentions “last year” I believe it means 2024. The new Federal rules were issued 18 December 2024 and the rules referenced were published in mid-2023.
Not to worry: since at latest Reagan the Republicans have been attacking the Civil Rights Act, and the anti-discrimination laws based thereon.
Their DOJ goes through the appearance of enforcing disability discrimination law but don't really mean it.
The ADA is a product of a Republican administration (Bush I).
When the Fed engineers revise their HC Ramp details then most HC Ramps in the US are now non-compliant. This has happened three times since 2010 and as recently as 2023. So the majority of ramps in the US are now out of spec and need replacement. A new paving project triggers the replacement. Do nothing and you don’t have to remove and replace older ramps.
Perfect dark humor of decent, earnest, ignorant clerks at work.
> each curb ramp costs roughly $50,000, totaling about $200,000 per intersection. […] Design and construction typically take 9 to 12 months per ramp
DEAR GOD WHY
It doesn’t. Not true.
That $50K/per ramp is ridiculous. NYC, which has much more dense infrastructure under streets and is infamous for high public construction costs is 1/5 of that.