Laura Glesby Photos
Tripping hazards on Audubon St.
Dave Agosta: "It is not possible for people with disabilities to 'travel' in New Haven. They can only 'navigate hazards.'"
Spotting a loose brick on the Audubon Street walkway, David Agosta nudged it with the tip of his toe — then reached down and handily uprooted the cube.
That block could have caused a twisted ankle or worse, the downtown disability rights advocate said, especially for pedestrians who get around using walkers or crutches or canes.
Mobility hazards like these have led him to ramp up his broader critique of New Haven’s accessibility by filing a formal complaint with the federal Department of Justice.
A 62-year-old disability rights activist, Agosta has been training himself to notice violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) along public sidewalks for the past year. He has spent “several hundred hours” researching disability law. He has tripped six times so far while documenting trip hazards with his DSLR Camera, he said.
Agosta recently filed preliminary complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities, alleging that the city has neglected sidewalks to the point of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and impeding disabled New Haveners from reaching basic needs.
He isn’t content with pointing out sidewalk trip hazards like the Audubon Street cube by simply shouting: “Watch out!” Nor does he limit his advocacy work to filing formal complaints.
He kicks the broken asphalt to show how a wheelchair might halt at the break. He piles up stray bricks beside trees to create protest sculptures. He leaves a dislodged tile on the doorstep of City Hall with a note proclaiming: “This is a gift from the disabled community.”
And he invites a reporter on a walk through downtown to illustrate how quotidian sidewalk ruptures can be especially perilous for New Haveners with disabilities.
According to the ADA’s design standards, accessible paths have to be 36 inches wide. The design standards permit “changes in level” — like breaks in concrete — of up to a quarter inch, or 6 millimeters. Any steeper edge must be beveled.
Agosta himself has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a condition that affects his joints and occasionally leads to injuries.
He transformed from a retired IT contractor into a mobility activist one day about last year, soon after his Ehlers-Danlos caused his left hip to subluxate, requiring him to try to get around using crutches. He was on his way to physical therapy when he found himself trapped on Orange Street by a bank of snow and a steep sidewalk rupture.
When he looked up across the street, he saw a banner hanging from the New Haven Academy Magnet School with the words: “Get Involved.”
Halted by the treacherous path with “crutches I could barely use,” he wondered, “How extensive is this problem?”
(He later described in an email how he made it to physical therapy: “I violated Section 14 – 300 of the CT General Statutes and used a driveway to get across the street to another driveway because they and the privately-owned sidewalks were clear. On the way back, I looked to the sky imploringly for divine guidance before crossing the mess on the north side of the block. I can recreate the journey because I remember every step. Being scared shitless embeds events in one’s memory.”)
Agosta points out the sidewalk that trapped him, along with a bank of snow, one fateful day.
Since then, Agosta has been on a mission to document sidewalks that able-bodied pedestrians might glance over, but that could become obstacle courses for people with a variety of disabilities.
He’s primarily focused complaints on the downtown and lower East Rock areas by his Orange Street apartment, as well as a number of trip hazards near Yale New Haven Health’s Saint Raphael campus, where he jokes there’s a “short trip to the E.R.”
He notes in his federal complaint that he has observed neighborhood-to-neighborhood disparities in the number of ADA violations as well, correlating with the racial makeup of those neighborhoods: “Simply put, the higher the percentage of White residents a neighborhood has, the fewer A.D.A. violations exist around the schools of that neighborhood,” he wrote in an addendum to his complaints to the Department of Justice and Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities.
On a recent “walking tour” of A.D.A. violations in his neighborhood, Agosta pointed out to this reporter stretches of sidewalk that could stop a wheelchair user in their tracks (or, at best, send them on a bumpy ride.)
“Now this is just horribly unsafe,” he said of a rocky stretch of Orange Street by Eld. While that problematic pavement is outside privately-owned property — making it the responsibility of the property owner, and not the city — Agosta still blames local government for not adequately enforcing ADA compliance. In 2003, a lawsuit against the city of Sacramento over sidewalk conditions established that local governments are responsible for ensuring that sidewalks comply with accessibility law.
When asked about Agosta’s arguments, the city declined to comment on the specific complaints, “as the ADA complaints mandate strict confidentiality and the DOJ complaints are a matter of pending litigation,” wrote City Spokesperson Len Speiller in an email.
Mayor Justin Elicker wrote in a statement, “The City of New Haven is committed to ensuring our sidewalks and streets are walkable, safe and accessible for all residents, including our residents with disabilities. With over 378 miles of sidewalks in the City of New Haven, it’s a significant and continuous undertaking that involves the participation of both the City and property owners — as, per city ordinance, sidewalks are ultimately the responsibility of the adjacent property owners.
“This year alone, the City of New Haven has completed over 200 sidewalk repairs, ten large sidewalk projects and additional sidewalk patching and grinding as well. Further, all new roadway projects are designed to ADA and Public Rights-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines (PROWAG) standards and any ADA issues with the project limits are always remediated,” Elicker wrote. “We encourage residents to report any accessibility issues or barriers through SeeClickFix to help ensure they are logged and addressed as expeditiously as possible.”
The Elicker Administration proposed and the alders approved earlier this fall a comprehensive legal-language update that scraps outdated references to people with disabilities in favor of so-called “person-first language.”
A Walking Hazards Walking Tour
On Orange Street by Eld, the sidewalk devolves into lumps.
On the walking tour, Agosta and this reporter paid particular attention to areas that were designed to be accessible, like handicap parking spaces riddled with trip hazards, or the jagged wheelchair-accessible back entrance to City Hall pictured below.
A common theme throughout Agosta’s East Rock/Downtown tour was the city’s inconsistent use of tactile feedback pads (usually a rectangular patch of raised dots) by crosswalks.
Tactile feedback pads are meant to signal the end of the sidewalk to visually-impaired pedestrians, enabling them to cross the street more safely. But often, Agosta pointed out, the city has installed tactile pads on just one side of the street, which might confuse visually-impaired walkers who expect to find another tactile signal where the crosswalk ends.
“It is not possible for people with disabilities to ‘travel’ in New Haven. They can only ‘navigate hazards,’ ” Agosta wrote in his complaint.
A ripped-up tactile signal Downtown.
Many of the issues he noted were the result of aging concrete, sloppy paving, or overgrown tree roots. Others, he argued, were a matter of poor design.
Like the stretch of College Street between Chapel and Crown that’s been partially converted to a pedestrian walkway since early in the pandemic. At a number of points on that block, pedestrians have little space to wind through sprawled-out restaurant tables, poles, trees, and other obstacles.
Agosta also takes issue with the jagged materials, like the College Street slate tiles, that the city occasionally uses to pave sidewalks.
He recalled helping a wheelchair user get through the College block with enormous effort — and far too many bumps.
Try getting through this stretch of College with a mobility impairment.
To Agosta, the ubiquity of potentially dangerous sidewalk flaws is one example of how physically disabled New Haveners — who make up an 13.5 percent of the city, according to the latest American Community Survey data — are too often ignored.
Even the commission tasked with representing the voices of disabled city residents — the city’s Commission on Disabilities — has only six of the required 15 commissioners, according to the city’s website. Until recently, that number was as low as two.
“New Haven is a leader on most civil rights issues,” but issues of disability access lag behind, Agosta said.
Agosta said that some city officials he’s contacted, like City Engineer Giovanni Zinn, have been responsive and thoughtful about ADA compliance issues. “A lot of violations I’ve reported have been fixed,” he said. Still, the city is working with too small a budget and too little urgency, he argued.
As the walk came to a close, he pointed out that sometimes attempted sidewalk fixes have only created new trip hazards, as with the curb pictured below.
