Blind resident finds fault with ADA-required curbing

GLEN RIDGE, NJ — If crossing the street wasn’t tough enough for a visually impaired person, Glen Ridge resident Peter Seymour said ADA curbing makes it downright dangerous.

According to Seymour, when the American Disabilities Act eliminated curbs at crosswalks in favor of ramps for wheelchairs, the law took away a landmark that visually impaired people used to orient themselves before taking another step forward.

“A curb is a barrier according to the ADA, but the perspective is very skewed,” Seymour said during a recent interview. “I need those curbs to know I stepped into the street. For me, it’s almost as if these curbs got labeled as an architectural barrier and they wiped them out because they were barriers for wheelchairs. That is a very limited idea of a disability.”

He sometimes goes out of his way to avoid ADA curbing. One time he cut through a parking lot and got nudged by a car. Feeling the car making contact, he jumped away, fell and broke his hip. He sued for $100,000 and won.

“It’s better for me to walk in the street,” he said. “It’s predictable. Predictability is very important if you have to navigate the world and are blind.”
There are not many signposts for him at a street corner. Seymour says there is only one. It is a rectangular pad, installed for the visually impaired. It has a bumpy surface that he can feel with his feet or cane. But the pad is often placed at an angle to a crosswalk. So if he were to locate the edge of the pad closest to the street and proceed to walk perpendicularly across it, he would not be in the crosswalk but in traffic.

One time, at Bloomfield and Ridgewood avenues, an Essex County road, he had to call for help because he could not orient himself. And where curbs once came to right angles at the corner, they are now being rounded off for vehicular traffic.

“Rounded corners make it even worst,” he said. “It’s like being in a circular room. There are no corners. You need to find a corner, something reliable.”

According to Seymour, ADA laws did not come into being overnight but took years of underhanded planning and preparation. He said the people behind curb changes first talked about children on bicycles and mothers pushing strollers.

“It was just sneaky,” he said. “They invoked these people but it was just politically helpful. It was a sneak attack on blind people. It was like weeds growing. I never heard the news — ’Watch out blind people!’”

Seymour lost his sight in 1983, after his sophomore year in college, from a virus he caught on a visit to Martha’s Vineyard. He has lived in Glen Ridge all his life and sometimes performs as a stand-up comic.

“Why did the blind man crossing the road?” he asked. “He thought he was on the other side.”
He had another one: “He thought a cure was around the corner but he couldn’t find the curb.”
Michael Zichelli, the borough planner, said in an interview earlier this week that when the borough does a roadway it must update street corners to conform with ADA codes.

“We have to bring curbing flush to the roadway,” he said. “It has to be perfectly level.”
Zichelli is aware of Seymour’s complaints since Seymour will address them at borough council meetings.
“Peter is losing the sense of ramp and roadway,” Zichelli said.

While GR Police Capt. Sean Quinn said there have been no reported accidents due to ADA curbing, the National Federation of the Blind said it has no policy on it.

“We don’t particularly have a strong opinion on this issue,” said NFB spokesperson Chris Danielson in a telephone message last week. “We typically advise most blind people to listen to the sound of parallel traffic to help maintain a straight line rather than trying to line up with the curb precisely because the curb may be designed in such a way that it is not useful as a reference point. That doesn’t work obviously for someone who is deaf and blind. That presents it own unique set of challenges.”

But because of Seymour’s complaints, Zichelli said the borough has made a change. What it is doing is installing two detectable warning surfaces at street corners that are perpendicular to each other. The edge of the pad closest to the street is parallel to the flow of traffic so that crossing over the pad would put someone into the crosswalk. This design is in use at the corner of Glenridge Parkway and Forest Avenue.

This may be only one corner of the town but it is a start in the right direction for people who have visual impairments and want to walk around Glen Ridge.

“From here to the post office, I crossed 20 streets,” Seymour said. “Would you drive on the Garden State Parkway if you knew one out of 100 drivers is a drunk driver? It’s not enough when it means your life. I feel a curb is a luxury item.”

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