Tbf this is in the middle of implementation- the paint is still drying.

Very possible as private utilities often rebuilt corners following their work but mostly eyeballed everything. They’ve been held to much higher standards recently.

The other backwards incentive is that capital funding is relatively easy to come by but operational funding is not. So it’s easier to get the very expensive time consuming improvement funded if it triggers no new maintenance. But the faster to build, higher maintenance methods get stalled.

Totally agree and I think it gets into how cities contract work including the legal environment, their requirements both cultural and statutory around that work. The will to do this work is there in the agencies but the cost and time constraints is a big bottleneck

Curb extensions require utility relocations unfortunately, most upgrades are happening without design work and contractors that can’t do this work for expediency’s sake. In cases where the corners are undergoing design, changes like curb extensions are being included.

There is a lot of info kept online about what’s getting upgraded here: www.nycpedramps.info

Almost always grading or clear path - either cross slope, flares, or inadequate landing areas, missing DWS, obstructions, poor drainage, things like that. I don’t believe age is typically factored in, sidewalks can have 50-100 year useful lives so most aren’t going to need replaced by that metric

The scandal is that before the lawsuit there were almost no compliant ramps, despite decades of building them. There are some economies of scale so even if a ramp is mostly fine you might as well upgrade if you have crews nearby. They’ll all need to be updated eventually.

I think a lot is up to engineering judgment, and given the circumstances NYC is being conservative. PROWAG standards were also finally made official by the US Access Board: www.access-board.gov/prowag/

Not always easy to tell from photos, but there's a very high threshold for getting grades/slopes correct. It looks like it only had a temporary warning surface as well. Corners like this (already have ramps and some sort of DWS) are low priority in the program, but they must ultimately be replaced.

The initial work was done wrong, unfortunately.

The thing is, they’re not compliant. That’s why the city faced a lawsuit from disability advocates and this work is happening now. The curb extensions aren’t getting built due to bad contract timing. The crews doing these upgrades can’t relocate utilities and they’re not working off designs.

The second pic is just a painted detectable warning surface. So the underlying slope compliance issues weren’t fixed. The difference is much more notable when using a wheelchair (which is why the city was sued for not installing ramps properly)

In NYC all camera evidence is reviewed by a city employee before issuing fines. The contract with the vendor does not include sharing of any revenue.

This program was recently expanded: www.nyc.gov/site/dep/new...

In NYC we found this was the case. Very large proportion of tickets issued on lower income neighborhoods were for cars registered in other zip codes. The inequality is in the built environment, not the cameras.