Evolving Pedestrian Environment NYC

The sky is falling. The Sky is falling. More precisely RantWoman seems to be seeing a lot of promos for different digital guidance navigation aids. None or VERY little of this promo material mentions the fact that pedestrian environments tend to be subject to both short and longterm deviations from or evolution away from the databanks used to provide the orientation guidance. People dig up the street. People put intemporary detours and permanent revisions and there is no update path for the info used by different electronic gadgets, not to mention the issue of whether people who live in a place for a long time even ever thinnk of USING the gadgets.


For instance, check out this item from NYC:

Subject: With Changes in New York’s Streets, More Hurdles for the City’s Blind Pedestrians

Date sent: Wed, 1 Aug 2012 17:55:52 -0700
**With Changes in New York’s Streets, More Hurdles for the City’s  Blind Pedestrians
****By MATT FLEGENHEIMER**Published: July 29, 2012
For more than a half-century, Mr. Stewart, 78, has been among  the thousands of New Yorkers, includinga recent governor, who overcame their visual impairments by creating meticulous  mental maps of the city, accounting for every sidewalk hump and crevice. But  over the past few years, amid sweeping changes to the city — newly sprouting  pedestrian plazas, sprawling construction projects, myriad bicycle lanes — many say they have lost their way.

“I moved to New York for accessibility,” said Maria Hansen,  who has lived in the West Village since the 1970s and has been legally blind since she was 21. “The game has changed.”Mr. Stewart, who lives in Midtown, knows how many paces beyond the streetlight his subway entrance is, how  many curbside planters he should expect to pass along the way and even  where, precisely, he is going to brush his white cane against a grate on  West 55th Street.
So a string of recent episodes struck Mr. Stewart as curious.  He found himself wandering accidentally into the madhouse of Broadway traffic. He has tumbled into a loading area, where it seemed the sidewalk used to be. Then there was the time he charged, forehead first, into a sign  or a chair or a table — it was hard to be certain, because the object seemed  to have sprung from the roadway, where once the coast was clear.

Some blind pedestrians have struggled to negotiate the subway construction along Second Avenue on the Upper East Side — a “DMZ zone,” a blind New Yorker, Dorrie Rush, called it, referring to a demilitarized zone. Others have reported standing at the edge of pedestrian plazas
estrian-plazas-nightmare-for-blind/ for several minutes, waiting for traffic that never seems to come, or  for a generous passer-by to tell them it never will. And many blind residents, conditioned to use the hum and rattle  of approaching cars as a cue, say an influx of less noisy hybrid  cars and bicycles in the city has made it virtually impossible to tell when the vehicles are closing in.

“I’ve gone my whole life without getting hit by a car,” said  former Gov. David A. Paterson, a Harlem native and the state’s first legally  blind chief executive. “I can’t say what’s going to happen with me and  a bicycle one day.” Janette Sadik-Khan, the city’s transportation commissioner, said  that in a growing and dynamic city, some alterations to the streetscape  were both inevitable and essential. “It’s not a workable strategy,” she said, “to keep the city  frozen in time.”

Many blind New Yorkers have acknowledged as much. But in recent  years, the city’s overhaul of many of its streets proceeded with a  “hastiness” that often failed to account for the needs of visually impaired  pedestrians, according to Councilman James Vacca, the chairman of the City  Council’s transportation committee.

“Their security is rooted in familiarity,” said Mr. Vacca, whose  father was blind. “There has to be a reorientation. I think that’s  something we’ve taken for granted.” Groups like Lighthouse International  and the PASS Coalition have lobbied to  counteract the changes with an increase in accessible pedestrian signals_locations which broadcast audible information at intersections, and detectable warning strips, whose bumpy surfaces supply a tactile marker of a sidewalk’s end.

About 60,000 New Yorkers are blind, according to Lighthouse, and  more than 360,000 have a severe visual impairment.



Ms. Sadik-Khan said that the Transportation Department had already installed accessible signals at dozens of intersections, and that a law passed this year  by the City Council called for signals to be added to 25 new  intersections each year. She noted that traffic-related pedestrian deaths had  fallen steadily over thepast decade.

But far more must be done, advocates said. The city has more  than 12,000 intersections, for one, but of particular worry are the street  layouts that diverge from the common grid.
Ms. Hansen, who travels with a German shepherd, Frisco, as a guide, said she had begun avoiding areas like Times Square, which she used to frequent, because pedestrian plazas have been added.
There is no definition of where the street is,” she said on a recent afternoon, as Frisco eyed a parade of less altruistic dogs from beneath a bench in Madison Square Park.

Another concern is the city’s historic embrace of a bike-share program, which is scheduled to begin this summer and will introduce 10,000 new bicycles to the streets by next summer. Though many visually  impaired residents have lauded the city’s green ambitions, some are worried that an increase in vehicles that move inaudibly, and unpredictably,  could be dangerous.
“They’re New Yorkers; they’re going to push the envelope,” Mr. Paterson said of cyclists. “But I don’t want to be the envelope.”

**



This article has been revised to reflect the following  correction:
*Correction: July 31, 2012*
Because of an editing error, an article on Monday about changes  in New York City over the past several years that have made it more difficult  for blind pedestrians to negotiate its streets misstated the portion of  Second Avenue where subway construction in taking place. It is on the Upper  East Side, not in Lower Manhattan.

******

A version of this article appeared in print on July 30, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: With Changes in New York’s Streets, More Hurdles for the City’s Blind Pedestrians.