In case you haven’t heard the latest in the saga that is the construction of the Silver Line metro, MWAA and Bechtel will be replacing several of the one year old sidewalk curb ramps that were installed as part of the construction of the Silver Line. These are entirely located along Route 123 and Route 7 directly adjacent to the metro stations.
Installing the wrong detail for ADA ramps has no excuse. Seriously, if you are a contractor who doesn’t know the proper dimensions for the landing and detectable warning truncated domes then I question you prior experience. That being said, to paint the picture that these curb ramps are the safety issue for ADA users, or the public as a whole, is misunderstand who, what, and where pedestrians are killed and injured by drivers.
In 2013 we noted two pedestrians fatalities that occurred in and around Tysons in a single day. Both incidents occurred in crosswalks. Both incidents occurred where pedestrians were provided legal ADA curb ramps. Both incidents would have had a dramatically lower likelihood if VDOT and FCDOT actually took their mission of providing all means of transportation seriously.
Over-sized and over-speed roads, poor lighting, bad signal timing which all but ignores pedestrians all supersede the physical elements of pedestrian access in terms of safety. Without the above three addressed those crossing streets will still be in blind spots, invisible to drivers. Without the above those with physical disability will struggle to cross the 10 lane intersections in the allotted 15 seconds (I’m yet to see a FCDOT or VDOT designer use one of these crosswalks but I assume they meant for people to sprint when they set the timing).
So we’ll end up getting the current curb ramps near the Silver Line, that is a good thing of course, but will this be a mission complete moment for VDOT? Once they meet their federal obligation will the simply return to business as usual and ignore the obviously more dangerous conditions to ADA (and all) pedestrians?
