Editorials

There’s an excellent letter to the Berkeley City Council in today’s issue from Helen Walsh and Mary Behm-Steinberg which calls attention to the city of Berkeley’s neglect of appropriate accommodations for people with mobility problems and other disabilities. I particularly appreciate it since I banged up a leg when I tripped on a porch stair, and have needed to use a cane and even a walker to get around for several months. I go to a fair number of meetings with a city planning focus, and what I’ve belated started to notice is how little attention is paid to the needs of people with intermediate levels of mobiity impairments.

It turns out that there are lots of stages between riding a bicycle around town and using a power wheelchair. I’m so old that I’m a year or two ahead of the enormous boomer demographic, but right behind me there are a whole lot more folks who are going to need some help getting around, if they don’t already. I’m getting around better these days, but I’m under no illusion that full mobility lasts forever for most of us. 

Way back in 2006, Berkeley’s beloved Pat Cody, a founder of the much-missed Cody’s Books, said this in a letter to the Planet: 

“Many of us elders walk daily for our health and for errands, as we no longer drive. I want to advocate more resting stops, like the ones found at bus stops, but scattered through neighborhoods where buses do not go. Lack of such benches keeps many elders virtually housebound.” 

And what’s happened since then? City mothers and fathers in their infinite wisdom have presided over the removal of many benches, responding to fears that a homeless person might nap on them, and the installation of few new ones. I wonder, does anyone in our commodious developer-funded city planning department have any statistics on the comparative numbers of able bicyclists versus pedestrians who might need to sit down occasionally? 

Then there are the many impediments (root: something that gets in the way of your feet) which have been added to make walking harder. That would include paying-guests-only sidewalk tables and chairs, advertising sandwich boards, and lately even robots.  

Yes, robots! I was stumping along Durant with my cane when I looked down to see my path on the sidewalk blocked by a knee-high robot. I tried to lock eyes to stare him [her? It? They? What pronouns do robots prefer?] down, but since it had no apparent eyes that didn’t work. It was lucky I happened to look down, since this was a serious trip hazard, a fall just waiting to happen. Do these things need permits? The rent-a-scooters presumably do, but that doesn’t keep riders off the sidewalks, and discards are often blocking the path.  

And navigation inside buildings for those of us with limited mobility but without wheelchairs is bad too, as Walsh and Behm-Steinberg have emphasized. I recently participated in a tour of buildings around Martin Luther King Civic Center Park, the downtown Berkeley historic district, as a member of the citizen committee contemplating possible changes in that area with the aid of a flock of city employees and consultants of every stripe. I was using my walker that day, and keeping up with my fellow committee members was challenging, but I learned a lot about the actual state of public access in public buildings.  

I already knew about the terrifyingly creaky elevator in the Maudelle Shirek Building (old City Hall) since I used to ride up sometimes with my late friend, Councilmember Dona Spring. But that building is largely unused at the moment, and the elevator still kinda sorta works, so I took it. 

The Veterans’ Building, however, was another story. It currently houses the Berkeley Historical Society, a homeless shelter, and at least one more office. It has had alterations aimed at accommodating wheelchair users, including a ramp in front and a tricky special door, but it’s not easy to walk into if you use a cane or a walker, as presumably many guests do. 

Inside on the first floor the disabled access symbol is prominently displayed, with an arrow pointing at an elevator. I was supposed to be touring the whole building with a view toward adaptive reuse. (There’s a gorgeous theater, now used for something else.) I pressed the “up” button on the elevator and waited. And waited. And waited. 

Finally a man, seemingly a shelter guest, clued me in. “That old thing? It hasn’t worked 20 years!” So somewhere on some checklist of accommodation attributes the Berkeley Veterans’ Memorial Building is recorded as having an elevator, but it’s faux. 

A lot of accommodations are more apparent than real. I’m on a commission that meets at night in city buildings, and in both of the ones I’ve been in, the single person staffing the front desk has turned off the button which disabled people are supposed to use to open the front door because of security fears. If that person steps away for a moment, the disabled visitor is left waiting out on the sidewalk at night, no fun in downtown Berkeley. 

And for many of us even walking for transportation will become a luxury eventually. There are relatively few buses and many places where public transit isn’t available. The lucky ones get rides from family and friends, or can pay to use Lyft or taxis, but being dropped off is not easy anymore. The elaborate re-jiggering of curb and street painting for bike lanes and bus stops has cut off many small businesses from offering landing sites for people exiting from autos. 

I’ve attended or watched online a number of meetings where eager planners pitch the seemingly obvious virtue of doing away with the parking lots at the Ashby and North Berkeley BART stations in order to add housing and commercial structures. Sounds swell, doesn’t it, but unless and until bus service is just a whole lot better than it is now, mobility limited commuters, especially the older ones, will bite the bullet and continue their journey in the car if they can’t park at BART. This is just common sense—I challenge anyone to produce data contradicting this prediction. 

And while we’re at it, once again, how about that data about how many able-bodied bicycle-capable people will there be in the older end of the Baby Boom cohort, as compared to those with mobility challenges?  

Don’t tell me that boomers will all be able to outwit nature’s inevitable changes with the help of modern medicine. I find among my friends that the one whose hip replacements no longer work is also the one who gave up her car at 60 and walked everywhere until she couldn’t, and the one who’s most faithful to her tai chi classes falls most often. Yes, I know that anecdotes aren’t data, but those who make their living planning should be required to produce some convincing demographic information to justify the expensive and inconvenient projects they continuously promote. And at the very least, they need to develop better models about how to serve those of us with all sorts of different kinds of needs on the spectrum of disabilities. As Mary and Helen tactfully but firmly remind us, it’s a matter of basic human rights.