Sidewalks to Nowhere:
The Supreme Court Lets Stand Landmark
Texas ADA Case
David Ferleger & Richard Frame
The United State Supreme
Court on Monday let stand a landmark sidewalk
access decision in favor of Richard Frame and several other
wheelchair users who won a ruling against Arlington, Texas on sidewalk access
under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The National League of
Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors had claimed that the challenged
decision will
impose a “crushing burden” on cities nationwide.
The case come to the high
court from the court of appeals which voted 8 to 7 last year that, when a city constructs
a new sidewalk or alters an existing one, the city must take reasonable
measures to ensure that accessibility to individuals with disabilities.
The landmark ruling rejected
Arlington’s argument that cities across the country may pick and choose when
and where to provide accessible sidewalks.
An engineer
in the aerospace and defense industry, lead plaintiff Richard
Frame became quadriplegic
after a devastating auto
accident twelve years ago. His body is paralyzed except for his
head and shoulders,. He controls his power wheelchair with delicate head
movements. Like most of the 3.4 million wheelchair users in the United States, Rick
Frame actively participates in the life of his community.
When he leaves his home, however, Mr. Frame is
excluded from his own
community. When he takes to
the streets of Arlington, Texas, he finds sidewalks to nowhere. Sidewalks with
a curb cut at one end and no way to leave the sidewalk at the other end.
Utility poles smack in the middle of a sidewalk. When he tried
to go from his doctor’s office to a restaurant across the street,
he discovered there was no way to get there. If his attendant parks Mr. Frame’s van in the
municipal parking lot on a game day, he cannot get by wheelchair to
the billion dollar Cowboys Stadium, built with $325 million in Arlington city
funds.
Joined
by other cities and national organizations, the City of Arlington, Texas asked
the nine justices to free Arlington and other cities from any obligation to
remedy their failure to make new and altered sidewalks
accessible to people who use wheelchairs, a discriminatory
violation of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. The court refused
to heed their plea.
A
decision in favor of Arlington would have denied access to beneficiaries of
technologies such as the Segway, the two-wheeled self-balancing device which
hundreds of veterans disabled in Iraq and Afghanistan now use to go to work,
walk their dogs and run with their children.
In addition to the law, there
are several moral, public policy and economic reasons why
the Supreme Court should refuse to hear Arlington’s appeal. This form of
discrimination is unfair, expensive and harmful to our
national economy. It has extremely negative
consequences for people without disabilities as well.
Excluding a class of people
from the same sidewalks which “walking people” use is simply unfair. When a great city
like Arlington builds and helps pay for monumental stadiums,
that town ought to ensure that all of its residents
can get to those stadiums, as well as to stores, hospitals, downtown
restaurants, and their children’s schools.
The National League of Cities
protested to the court that, “sidewalk improvement programs can cost a
single city hundreds of millions of dollars.” The appeals court disagreed. It
explained that Congress looked at the question quite differently. Congress
found that disability discrimination “costs the United States billions of
dollars in unnecessary expenses resulting from dependency and nonproductivity.”
Our national economy will benefit when cities are
compelled to connect the dots and provide pathways in the community for people
with mobility impairments. The ADA itself states that “the mainstreaming of
persons with disabilities will result in more persons with disabilities
working, in increasing earnings, in less dependence on the Social Security
system for financial
support, in increased spending on consumer goods, and increased tax revenues.”
Discrimination is a “totally unnecessary contributor to
public deficits” and costs literally billions of dollars annually in support
payments and lost income tax revenues,” the Congress concluded.
Cities need to do it right the first time. When it comes to sidewalk
accessibility, Congress
recognized that the additional cost of making a new sidewalk readily accessible
is “often nonexistent or negligible.” When Arlington chose to build or alter
inaccessible sidewalks after the 1992 ADA effective date, the city wasted
taxpayers’ money and broke the law.
Inaccessible sidewalks harm
everyone. Simply put, what works for people with disabilities works for
everyone. We have all used curb ramps where sidewalks meet the street. They are
useful when we are pushing a baby stroller or a shopping cart, lugging a
suitcase, moving furniture, walking with crutches, or helping an elder cross a
street. Bicyclists use curb ramps all the time.
Just as the invention of the
typewriter, Jacuzzi and even email originated as efforts to benefit people with
disabilities, so has the development of curb cuts, first implemented in 1945 in
Kalamazoo, Michigan, as an accommodation for soldiers returning from World War
II.
At
a July 1990 ceremony, President George Herbert Walker Bush declared that with his
“signing
of the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act, every man, woman, and child
with a disability can now pass through once-closed doors into a bright new era
of equality, independence and freedom." Now, 22 years later, it is past
time for all those who pass through those doors to be able to join one another,
co-workers and their neighbors.
_______________________
David Ferleger is an attorney
near Philadelphia, PA and represents the plaintiffs in the litigation in the
Supreme Court. Richard Frame lives in Arlington, TX, is a retired Registered
Accessibility Specialist, and is one of the plaintiffs before the
Supreme Court.
