Honolulu's sidewalks to get $77M overhaul
| • | Graphic: Sidewalks for all |
By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Transportation Writer
The city plans to spend $77.4 million in six years to make thousands of sidewalks accessible to wheelchair users and visually impaired pedestrians. By the time the work is done in 2007, the city will have built nearly 8,000 sidewalk ramps near every business district, school, park or other heavily used public space in Honolulu.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
The ramps, which cost between $6,000 and $8,000 each to design and build, were required by the Americans with Disabilities Act passed by Congress in 1991. Until this year, however, the city had built fewer than 100 of them.
Workers with Leo Fleming Projects Plus, a subcontractor, examine sidewalks at Fern and Isenberg streets in Mo'ili'ili.
Now under a federal court consent decree and the supervision of court-appointed monitor, the city has accelerated plans to build the ramps. Next year, the city budget includes $3.5 million to design 1,099 ramps and $10.3 million to build 1,611 more.
"It's something we simply have to do, no matter what the cost," said city Managing Director Ben Lee, who is supervising the push to get the ramps built.
The ramps provide wheelchair users and other disabled people the freedom to participate in all aspects of life, including everything from holding a job and seeing a doctor to going out to movies or a nightclub, said Gary Smith, president of the Hawai'i Disability Rights Center.
"If you are in a wheelchair, you are a prisoner without those kinds of access," Smith said. In Hawai'i, an estimated 144,000 to 240,000 people have some disability, although not all are mobility related.
The city effort is a result of a federal lawsuit filed in 1996 by Honolulu attorney Stanley Levin on behalf on two disabled O'ahu residents. At that time the city agreed to build more than 3,000 curb ramps by January of this year, but completed just 95 of them.
Last year, Levin filed a new lawsuit asking the courts to order faster action. The city, working with a court-appointed special monitor, agreed to a plan that will guarantee accessibility in nearly every commercial and public area. After that, the city will get to work on sidewalks in residential areas, Lee said.
"I think they're finally on the right track now," Levin said. "I think they finally understand how important this issue is."
Lee said the city fell behind on building the ramps because of a lack of money and shifting instructions about ramp standards. Even now, the federal government has yet to issue any standards for ramp design, said Bill Hecker, a Birmingham, Ala., consultant whom the city has hired as an adviser.
Under its new court order, the city has hired a construction manager whose sole responsibility is to deal with wheelchair ramp issues, waived some procurement procedures and developed a priority system to identify ramp locations which can be built quickly.
The city gives top priority to intersections where wheelchair users make a specific request and then to locations where ramps can be built without moving more than two obstacles, such as gas lines, signal control boxes or drainage outlets.
"When a requests comes in from a wheelchair user, it gets absolute top priority," Hecker said. "We'll build as many ramps as necessary to give that person the access they require."
This year, Honolulu is spending $3.3 million to design and $5.1 million to build the ramps. During a six-year period beginning this year, the budget will include an average of $12.9 million annually for ramps.
Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser
The problem is familiar to officials nationwide in municipalities that have struggled to comply with the federal ADA requirements, whose goal is to give people with disabilities equal access to public facilities.
Danny Valera of Ron's Construction applies asphalt at a sidewalk on Mahiole Street in Salt Lake. The city, under pressure from a consent decree, must build almost 8,000 sidewalk ramps by 2007.
"It's an unfunded federal mandate that we all have to comply with," Lee said.
Smith said Honolulu residents generally accept the need for the expensive ramps.
"I've never heard anybody complain that it's a bad expenditure of tax dollars," he said. "They don't just benefit the disabled, but mothers with baby carriages, people with shopping carts and local businesses, too."
Although the city delayed building the ramps for more than a decade, it still is ahead of many Mainland cities, said Francine Wai, executive director of the Hawai'i Disability and Communication Access Board.
"Honolulu was one of the first places in the nation to be seriously challenged in a lawsuit over the sidewalks," said Wai, whose office reviews all plans for sidewalk ramps. "Because of that we're probably doing fairly well compared to some locations." Wai said the the cost of the ramps has been inflated, in part, because "our process is far more bureaucratic and time-consuming and probably more costly than the way they do it in other locations."
Although the court-ordered consent decree applies only to Honolulu, other counties in Hawai'i face similar legal challenges to build the ramps, Wai said.
"They all have lawsuits. Each county has created a formal transition plan to do the work, and they are in various stages of design and construction," she said. "It's not quite as big a problem on Neighbor Islands because they have a lot fewer curbs to deal with." The federal law does not require accessibility in places where there are no sidewalks.
Lee said the ramps have been far more complicated and expensive to build than anyone suspected when the city first entered into a consent decree in 1997. The task often is complicated by having to move traffic lights, storm drains, water meters, fire hydrants and other fixtures to install the curb ramps.
"First, every intersection has to be professionally surveyed by a company to determine the slope of the street and intersection," Lee said. Then engineers and architects have to individually design ramps, which include a 4-foot area with no more than a 2 percent slope and adjacent areas, up to 15 feet wide, with slopes no more than 8.33 percent. Federal law also requires the concrete in ramps to be textured or scored so that visually impaired users will know where the street begins.
Often, Wai said, finished ramps have to be rebuilt after other government agencies or utility companies made changes to them.
"Sometimes we already have a perfectly good ramp and somebody else will come along and negate what's just been done," she said. "We've had situations where somebody will come up and put a traffic signal or drainage ditch right in the middle of the ramp."
Still, Honolulu's ramps are among the best designed and built in the nation, Wai said.
"I'll put our end products up against anything I've seen elsewhere, and I've seen a lot of them all across the country," she said.
Many municipalities throughout the country are looking to Honolulu as a model for their responses, Hecker said.
"We're ahead of the curve because we were forced by the lawsuits to be ahead," he said. "Now, there is no question that other parts of the country are facing similar lawsuits and will use the same strategy that we developed in Honolulu. They see us as model for action."
Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.
