EASTHAMPTON — The city’s transportation network, especially when it comes to sidewalks and crosswalks, is woefully inadequate for people with disabilities to use, based on results from a wide-ranging survey recently presented to the City Council.
Conducted by the Commission on Disability, disabled community members identified transportation as the city’s foremost accessibility issue.
The 2021 survey covered subjects including accessibility of venues and facilities, resources for aid, social and emotional health, safety, the city government website, overall experience, and demographics.
“There are a lot of small little interesting things about the survey, but the one undeniable overwhelming message we got from it was about our transportation network,” said Eli Damon, vice chair of the Commission on Disability, at a Sept. 20 council meeting.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 9.8% of Easthampton’s residents under 65 years of age have a disability, which includes physical and mental impairment. And across Massachusetts, people with disabilities constitute 11.5% of the state’s population.
The 66-question survey, intended for Easthampton residents, workers and visitors who have disabilities, received 69 responses, which was “higher than should be expected,” according to Damon.
Across all open-ended questions where respondents could have written about anything, a third chose to write about transportation issues.
“To me, this suggests a widespread frustration about our transportation network here in Easthampton,” Damon said.
City Council President Homar Gomez said, “Every time that we hear politicians talking, it’s inclusion, inclusion, inclusion. This is the time to include our disability community in our conversations and our projects.”
Responding to a question about accessibility of roads and streets, one in five respondents said they could use city roads and streets “only with great difficulty or support, or not at all,” while about a third of respondents said “with some difficulty or minimum support.”
And sidewalks and crosswalks were identified as an even larger problem, with over 60% of respondents acknowledging difficulty using them.
In an open-ended question asking participants what accessibility-related challenges they face on a day-to-day basis, about one in three of responses mentioned sidewalk- and crosswalk-related issues.
“I’d like to point out that this question was very general, so people could have talked about anything not necessarily transportation-related,” said Damon. “But a third of them decided to talk about sidewalks and crosswalks.”
Damon said responses included the problems such as: lack of sidewalks on some streets, no curb cuts on some sidewalks, narrow and/or uneven sidewalks, a lack of visual or auditory pedestrian signals, snow and ice not being fully cleared, and short walk phases on crosswalks.
In addition to sidewalks and crosswalks, other transportation-related problems named by survey respondents include accessible parking, public transportation and bus service, and street safety.
Respondents suggested improvements like adding speed bumps on Clark Street and Franklin Street, making sidewalks ADA accessible, fixing lighting by Riverside Industries, and making crosswalks safer for hearing and vision impaired, among other suggestions.
“This is a problem that doesn’t have an easy fix,” Damon said. “It’s something where we need to come up with new kinds of policies, new ways to do things. … We need to have a conversation that brings in the whole community, and makes use of everyone’s experiences, their areas of expertise, their creativity, to come up with new ideas.”
Councilor Brad Riley pointed to the City Council Public Safety Committee, the city’s public works department, and the mayor as key players in working toward solutions.
“Even as someone who does not have a disability, when it comes to walking around the community, I have also shared some of these observations myself,” said Riley. “So yes, we would be solving problems for our residents who have disabilities, but this would benefit every single person in our community.”
For now, the Commission on Disability is working on creating a follow-up survey to gain more insights from the community on next steps.
Maddie Fabian can be reached at mfabian@gazettenet.com.