The Curious Tale Of The West Dunbartonshire Ramp

This is a story about a campaign to make a house accessible for a disabled child which should get all designers thinking about inclusive design.

The ramp as viewed from the house.
Photo from Clydebank Post.

The story is essentially that a 7-year old girl, who uses a wheelchair, was not able to leave the house because of a flight of steps. Her family had been campaigning for access improvements for their house and West Dumbartonshire Council eventually installed a ramp, which certainly meets the requirement for access, but is not pretty.

The first thing to note is how different the national press and local press have reported the story. The Guardian report is fairly factual, but relies on "local builders" to cost the work at £40k without any comment from the Council - for my mind, pretty sloppy. There is also an opinion piece from Frances Ryan which really has a go at the Council "you want a ramp, I'll give you a ramp" - I suspect she doesn't know the full details and like me, she is fully engaged in armchair punditry.

View from the street.
Image by Hemedia/ Mark Sutherland via The Guardian.

The local paper, Clydebank Post, may be more balanced - it turns out that the family moved in with the full knowledge of what the access was like and then campaigned for the access improvements. Now the works are complete, the family is not happy because the Council won't install a gate. The Metro has the story as a snippet, but which actually gives a decent photo of the context of the work and is of most interest to me as an engineer.

A picture paints a thousand words!
Image by SWNS via The Metro.

I find the reporting rather sad as the important person in all of this is a little girl who is constantly referred to as "suffering" from the condition which means she relies on her wheelchair. 

The only thing she is "suffering" is the minor media scrum of opinion which is quick to condemn the local council in showing off a £40k "eyesore" and dare I say it, a fuss created by a family who took on a house knowing the lack of access - did they fully put their daughter's interests first?

OK, the trouble with news like this is that it is a bluster of sensation and it quickly moves on and apart from the council being slow there isn't really a story here. We never learn of the full details and so it is hard to draw any proper conclusions. The family may have taken the house because it was close to family or friends, or it was convenient for schools; despite the obvious issue of trying to get their child and her wheelchair up a flight of stairs to a front door over 1.5 metres (at least) higher than the street. 

What was the alternative here? OK, the ramp might have been more attractively designed, but the system used will have kept costs down (it will have been less than £40k). A lift would have involved digging a trench into the garden with a lift shaft next to the house. Alternatively, a lift could have been provided from the street entrance with a high-level platform to the house (a little bridge if you will). The problem is maintenance. A ramp takes very little.

The council in following its duty to provide access (something I think campaigners should challenge their local authorities more about) has met the requirements - something the mother even admits to. But, the outcome is not pretty. Ramps are installed at houses all over the place without comment or debate, the only difference here is that of scale.

The steps slide back to reveal a lift, with a second one inside the
main entrance to the building.
Image from www.wheelchairaccess.co.uk

One Great George Street (OGGS) in Westminster is the headquarters of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE). The Grade II listed Edwardian building in common with many of the era and indeed in the area, has steps up into it. Quite a few! 

Some years ago, the Institution decided that sending those who couldn't easily access the main entrance to the building round the back was no longer acceptable and so the main entrance was remodelled to include a clever hidden lift system which allows access for all via the main entrance. 

There was a fuss by some members at the time because of the cost involved (amongst other things, we members pay towards running the place!), but the scheme went ahead and these lifts are now not unusual at all. A video of how it works can be seen here and given how accessible the place is for an old building, its success as a conference and events venue clearly vindicates the original decision to install the lifts both from an access and financial point of view!

When the the house in West Dumbartonshire and OGGS were built, inclusive access didn't exist. The house was built on an estate sitting on a hill and the layout will have sought to minimise excavations with many dwellings sitting well above the street. For OGGS, it was built in the era of grand staircases being used to enter buildings and of course, raising the ground floor makes a basement easier to build.
In 2014, we should never build anything new which cannot be accessed by everyone - and this doesn't mean a separate entrance, it means the same entrance. This goes for trains, buses, buildings - everything. Our retrofits are now much cleverer and as the ICE showed, we can make a building accessible without affecting its look. Of course, in West Dumbartonshire, we have what compromise looks like and perhaps we still have some way to go.

A Small But Determined Vigil

Last night, I attended a vigil to remember the first cyclist to die on London's Roads this year. I have thought about whether I should post about it on and off today, but on balance thought I should.

Protesting and campaigning is not something I have really been involved in. I did attend the huge London Cycle Campaign protest at the end of last summer, but that had a happy, carnival atmosphere and not the solemnity of a vigil.

I am a recent user of Twitter and for its faults, it enables news to travel quickly and so I learnt on Monday of a vigil planned outside Redbridge Town Hall for last night (11/2/14) in memory of the first cyclist to lose their life on the Capital's roads this year. Kevin Lane, died on Sunday afternoon.

A small, but determined vigil for Kevin Lane.

As it turned out, my own plans meant that I was going to be fairly close to Ilford and so I decided to go to the vigil which was organised by Stop Killing Cyclists. 

There were only a handful of us and after brief chat, the press arrived to take photos of our bikes laid in front of the town hall steps and to talk to Donnachadh and the others from the group.

As an engineer, I get involved in the numbers and money game of casualty statistics. I am often having to write back to people who are requesting perfectly reasonable safety improvements to tell them that we have no funding - the cuts have hit many highway authorities hard and I cannot see it getting better any time soon.

Attending the vigil has made me pause for thought. Behind the numbers, the posturing and the standardised replies, there are people involved here and that is something that practitioners sometimes need to be reminded of and they in turn sometimes need to remind those making decisions. It is for those reasons that I have posted. We do learn about the deaths on our own parts on London's street network and it does affect the engineering teams each time. My peers at Redbridge will certainly know what is happening on their patch and they will be reflecting. I just hope that the message gets to the decision makers.

The School Run (Well Walk & Cycle Anyway!)

I was invited to give a talk at a school travel conference this week which was attended by several local primary and secondary school pupils and staff.

Typical outer-London layout, no good for children trying to get to
school. Yes, only one "traffic" lane here!

We heard from schools leading the way in getting the school run away from the car and onto bike or foot and how they were working with other schools in their area to share their experiences. 

We heard from the pupils themselves who were pretty much running the whole agenda for smarter travel in their schools. It was also amazing how many walked or cycled, in an outer-London context, given what the prevailing conditions are like!

For my talk, as I only had ten minutes I gave a slideshow of photos from some of my travels to try and show what could be done to make riding bikes to school easier and feel safer

My ice-breaker was a photo of me in bright orange doing the Ride London last year (OK, the 8 miler!), where I emphasised that this was sport cycling, not day to day cycling! I then did a straw poll on who cycled to work or school - I reckon about 10% of the 80 or so people there.

My next photo was one of my favourites from Copenhagen with the child in the cargobike on a clear cycle track in the snow. I informed the audience that this was what every day cycling was about.

I then blasted through a series of photos showing examples of filtered permeability, cycle tracks, traffic signals for bikes, cycle parking, traffic order exemptions and so on - many of you will have seen the photos on this blog before. 

Some of my examples were cheap and simple, aimed at making local roads quiet. Some were serious bits of engineering for the places where direct links at main roads were vital and where people on bikes needed protection. Oh, and I did show Royal College Street, even though I know some people are not fans!

I ended with a mock-up of a busy road outside one of the schools attending the conference, where I had reworked things to provide a bidirectional cycle track. It was not totally thought out, but gave a flavour of what we need to do on the main roads. I then asked if we used some of the things I had shown, how many people would cycle to work or school. About 75% of the people in the room put up their hand!

Children don't want the school run to look like this. Why aren't we
and especially elected people listening to them?

I know this is not scientific and to some extent, many of the people there were already really interested in leaving the car behind to get to their school (whether pupils or staff). But, if only we started building, imagine what the school run could look like.

There was a Q&A session for the presenters and I was asked what I thought was the best way to get schemes built to help people walk and cycle. Apart from the schools getting the ideas in their travel plans (a funding bid hoop they need to jump through), I advocated the schools getting into groups in their local areas and working with their communities and their neighbours to get a plan together of what they wanted to see. 

After a decade in local government highways, I would say that officers can make suggestions until they are blue in the face - it needs local people to step up and demand change from their elected representatives and remind them who their current and future voters are!