Sometimes City gov does good things without fanfare
Some background: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 was a landmark civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. One of its key requirements is that all levels of government develop ADA Transition Plans. These plans catalog infrastructure that does not comply with ADA standards, including government buildings and public rights-of-way.
Until this past winter, the City did not have an ADA Transition Plan in place. The process of cataloging non-compliant infrastructure took two years, from 2021 to 2023. Since then, the City has been gradually addressing the identified issues. This month, those efforts have reached Washington Avenue, where all curb ramps are being replaced to meet ADA standards.
This issue is personal to me. Those who have followed me on Twitter for a while know that I’ve been advocating for the development of this plan for years. Before 2016, I didn’t give it much thought, until my dad lost a leg and had to navigate the world in a wheelchair. Watching him struggle with inaccessible public spaces opened my eyes to the importance of ADA compliance.
One of the final things I did at MoDOT, where I served as an asset manager overseeing project programming, was pushing for $100 million in funding for ADA-compliant sidewalks across MoDOT’s system from 2017 to 2027. Some of the MoDOT projects that came out of that;
https://www.modot.org/projects/missouri-route-267-sidewalkada-improvements-st-louis
https://www.modot.org/projects/missouri-route-100-sidewalkada-improvements-st-louis
https://www.modot.org/projects/missouri-route-21-sidewalkada-improvements-st-louis-county
https://www.modot.org/projects/route-d-sidewalkada-improvements-st-louis