Curb Bumpouts

These seem to be cropping up all over the city.
This is where, at intersections, the curb on the side street gets pushed out, narrowing the road bed and widening the parkway,

The Dept of Transportation comes around telling the community groups about their traffic calming effect, enhanced pedestrian safety and beautifying the corner with planters. This may all be true, but that is not why they put them there.

The real reason is a law suit.

In 2005 the city got sued in Federal court by the Council for Disability Rights for lack of compliance with ADA standards for sidewalks.

Now, this wasn’t a bad thing. The city had been doing a pretty crummy job of addressing accessibility issues. Frankly, I’ve been on logging roads that were easier to travel than Chicago’s curb ramps and a lawsuit seems to be the only way there is to get the city to do their job.

True to form, the first words out of the city’s mouth were, “We don’t need no federal intervention, your honor. We promise dat all da new ramps will pass inspection.”

The judge said, “Fine. You gotta year to prove it.”
At the end of the year, the city took the judge out to a showplace set of sidewalks on Chicago Ave and when they measured them, not a single ramp passed muster.

The city said, “Everything will be perfect from now on.”
Then, to show that they were really on the ball, the city wrote its own set of standards. These were even stricter than the fed’s. These standards must have been written by lawyers, because, by the time you add up the ramp, the landing and the corner radius, you need 15 ft wide sidewalks to ramp a typical 6 in curb.

Here in Wicker Park, most of our commercial streets have a 66 ft right of way. That doesn’t leave enough room for 15 ft sidewalks.

So the city bumps out the parkway into the side street. This not only gives them a few extra feet to play with, but it shortens the curb height because the curb meets the roadbed higher on the crown of the pavement. It also moves the corner radius over so that the ramp on the shorter sidewalk (toward the commercial street) lands parallel to the curb. Not allowing for the radius saves about two feet.

As for the lawsuit, a month later the director of the CDR sees the city pouring new sidewalks on Fullerton and has them measured.

Once again, they were wrong. The city settled the lawsuit by promising $140 million in compliant ramps over the next five years. That’s $50 million on top of the budgeted amount.

So, expect some curb bumpouts at a corner near you.

Paul K. Dickman