The city of Boston has received more than 6,000 snow-related complaints since a late January storm dropped nearly two feet. While roads are mostly clear of snow, there are many sidewalks, crosswalks and intersections still inaccessible for people using wheelchairs or walkers, or pushing strollers.
Boston resident and disability advocate Casandra Xavier demonstrated how challenging it can be to get around during a visit this week to Hyde Park Avenue in Jamaica Plain.
Xavier has vision and hearing impairments and uses a white cane. She swings it the width of her shoulders across the ground to know if she can step forward. But that doesn’t work when curbs are buried in snow and sidewalks are only partially cleared.
Xavier tried to make her way down a sidewalk where the shoveled path was less than a foot wide. No go.
Instead, she opted to walk on the road, alongside rushing traffic. She calls it “shore-lining.”
“I will not risk falling on hard, dirty snow because of a negligent shoveler,” Xavier said.
Katarina Torres Radisic, nervously watched Xavier from the sidewalk. They’re the executive director of Riders’ Transportation Access Group, which advises the MBTA on accessibility. A few times a year, the group and a coalition of other Massachusetts-based transportation advocates gather to evaluate road infrastructure and functionality. They visited this same location in November and flagged multiple concerns about the crosswalks, speeds of vehicles and poor conditions of curb ramps, among other issues.
Torres Radisic said the snow has exacerbated those concerns. And the frigid temperatures haven’t helped — in many areas, if the curb ramps aren’t buried in snow, they’re caked in ice. And high snowbanks force people to stand in the roadway to see if a car is coming.
Torres Radisic pointed out an MBTA bus stop, which serves the 32 bus route. It was flanked by snowbanks, but had a 3-foot-wide cut-out for boarding the bus. A bumpy sheet of ice encased the sidewalk up to the curb.
“If someone who uses a wheelchair, or anyone else who needs the ramp, the ramp’s not going to be flush with the sidewalk, which is going to make boarding the bus or getting off the bus very difficult,” they said.
The MBTA is responsible for clearing out snow at the stops for 22 key bus routes. The city is responsible for shoveling out other bus stops, on top of its regular snow-removal duties.
T chief operating officer Ryan Coholan said in the days after the storm the transit authority had a “constant focus” on keeping bus stops clear. But he acknowledged it’s an uphill battle as city plows continue clearing roads, leaving new mounds of snow at every pass.
“There’s a lot of checking, sending back, verifying everything’s good,” he said. “A snow plow comes by and everything’s bad again.”
Coholan said people can report bus stop accessibility concerns to MBTA customer support.
Back on Hyde Park Avenue, Torres Radisic said the poor conditions of the sidewalks, crosswalks and intersections is tough for people who rely on wheelchairs, canes or walkers to go about their daily lives.
“This is 10 days, or over a week, after the snowstorm, and some people still can’t access the community because of the lack of snow removal,” they said on Wednesday.
Xavier, the disability advocate, says she grew up in Boston and is used to winter conditions. But she feels the city has been negligent in its handling of the latest storm.
“This is unusual. I don’t recall it being this bad,” she said. “I feel like they’ve done better in the past, but I don’t know what’s got into them this year.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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