Streets program aims to exceed ADA requirements

Mass Innovations, from The Beacon, December 2013

Incorporating handicapped-accessible features into road construction, as mandated by the federal Americans With Disabilities Act, poses financial challenges for many cities and towns.

In Somerville, the state’s most densely populated city, a program now in place is designed not only to meet ADA requirements but to exceed them. The city’s five-year Neighborhood Street Reconstruction Program, launched earlier this year, has numerous objectives, including ensuring that road repairs are made in a cost-effective manner and that public transportation is widely accessible for the handicapped and the able-bodied alike. But the city also hired a full-time ADA coordinator to help implement the plan.

Local officials say that Somerville was in a good position to do an exhaustive analysis of its street needs because of SomerStat, the city’s performance-benchmarking system. According to Engineering Director Robert King, the needs of individual streets were gauged on a matrix, with the importance of accessibility being almost double-weighted.

“We wanted to make sure that situations where we were running into problems moved up [in priority],” King said. “It also streamlined the process to make sure that we were taking care of our bigger accessibility issues in the near term.”

King said that making expanded access for the handicapped the top priority in the Neighborhood Street Reconstruction Program won’t necessarily result in cost savings. But it will fulfill one of Mayor Joseph Curtatone’s priorities.

“We want Somerville to be a walkable city even for those in wheelchairs,” Curtatone wrote in a 2012 column in the Somerville Journal.

The street reconstruction program also is designed to create more hospitable space for pedestrians and cyclists, particularly in the dense eastern end of the city, adjacent to Boston’s Charlestown district.

“What this project did was consolidate a lot of information that was already being discussed among department heads,” said Austin Faison, an analyst who works in the SomerStat office. “It brought all the voices together and made one plan that we can go back to year after year.”

Improving conditions for pedestrians in Somerville has been a focus for the better part of a decade. A task force established in 2006 identified more than two dozen sites throughout the city where pedestrian safety could be enhanced.

For more information, contact Robert King at (617) 625-6600, ext. 5400.