Getting from A to B via Z(ig-zags).

I’m in the midst of a particularly intense period at work right now, and I have had literally no time to post. A computer slow-down at the moment is all that’s giving me a breather to squeeze a quick observation in. The second part of my dissection of the neighborhoods/subdivisions in Baton Rouge will have to wait until this crunch time ends—hopefully within a few days.

In the meantime, I offer a reflection on a topic of considerable interest to me—the engineering of spaces to accommodate the disabled. For the most part, the infrastructure that aids mobility for the vision-impaired or wheelchair-bound has blended in with the surroundings fairly effectively. Phone booths, rendered non-compliant with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities act, have become a rare sight—all we generally encounter today are pay phones poised on metal poles. (And how much longer will we even see those?) In a matter of years, audible “chirping” pedestrian crossing signals will be commonplace. Nearly all public restrooms serving a facility over a certain minimum size have at least one double-wide stall with support bars. Most fire alarms in buildings feature flashing lights for those who cannot hear. And the novelty of wheelchair access ramps has worn down, so chances are we don’t even notice them most of the time.

But not always.



This small college in West Virginia features a central foyer in its principal lecture hall, and the seating for the two large lecture rooms on either side is just as heavily sloped. As anyone who has been to West Virginia knows, it is a state of great topographic variety—the most consistently rugged core of Appalachia. It is not uncommon for the north side entrance to a structure to be at an entirely different grade from the south side. The slope upon which this building stands is unsurprising; the prevalence of the handicapped ramp is unsurpassed. Regardless of which side a person enters, it is the only thing that stands out.



Though the appearance of the building does not suggest it to be particularly old, I would venture a bet that it still predates the Americans with Disabilities Act—it is almost certainly a retrofit. I can think of no other reason why an architect would design a ramp (or why the University’s facilities planners would approve of it) so that it becomes the only means of negotiating a grade change. Clearly the slope is severe enough that this was the only way of integrating a usable handicapped ramp into the relatively limited space that still falls under maximum incline standards, but it is visual obstruction as well as a physical one for the 99% of people who would be perfectly content with using stairs. They have to use the ramp as well.

The problem at this school represents a strange inverse of the predicament I blogged about a few weeks ago at the Memphis Airport, in which the absence of ramps along a concourse means that stairs are the principal option for managing a grade change. Wheelchairs can negotiate through a neighboring elevator, but what about an emergency evacuation when elevators may be down? Ramps provide the best option. Meanwhile, here in West Virginia, the absence of stairs at the buildings primary arterial could cause far more congestion for the majority of students, who would otherwise use stairs to evacuate.

These dilemmas demonstrate more vividly the challenges of accommodating extreme situations, for which external constraints are often formidable. Is it reasonable to plan for highly unlikely evacuation scenarios? Clearly the introduction many decades ago of fire codes and mandatory exit signage suggests that the public has continuously respected alterations in building construction that favor as close to a universalizing of safety as possible. But the continued introduction of new safety mechanisms also proves that universal design—the closest means of articulating the goal—is an incremental process, and it perpetually pursues the metric for perfection (i.e., universality) that will continue to dwell out of reach of engineers and designers as new demands for safety and accessibility pose increasingly diverse constraints. As cynical as this may sound, imperfection is a fact of life and will always stimulate human ingenuity to strive for improvement. The humble little building in the above photos is part of a medical school, and no sensible physician would ever claim to go into the profession with the goal of curing all disease. An irritant for one person may be the anodyne for another; solutions to the built environment are no different.

Further proof that car-culture is a religion.

It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to guess that one of the greatest concerns in retaining the viability of historic urban centers involves the accommodation of parking. Ask anyone what his or her opinion of X downtown is, and chances are excellent that the issue of where to put the car will arise within a few sentences. Planners, urban theorists, public administrators, and business leaders have all stood on the soapbox to assert their positions on the parking debate. And I’ve blogged about multiple times in the past—not yet ad nauseam (at least by my own standards), but let this be a warning: the topic provides such fertile ground for discussion that I have stashed away many other musings for well into the future.

During a recent visit to the picturesque town of Lewisburg, in southern West Virginia, I was taken by a sign that announced a collaboration which is disarmingly rare.

The local United Methodist church shares its parking lot with the City. It’s not large, as the photos below indicate:

But it remains the largest surface lot in this community of 3,600, and the partnership is undoubtedly a boon for the local chamber of commerce. Unlike the majority of American towns of this size, Lewisburg has discovered a means of reawakening its aging main street, with a large number of commercial buildings surviving to house restaurants, galleries, and specialty grocers.


By this point, the picture-perfect, historic small-town main street—nearly always filled with eclectic shopping that is of little day-to-day use—is almost as much of a cliché as the moribund town center that has witnessed the shifting of its commercial heart, over to the big boxes stores at the automobile-oriented periphery. But the fact remains that the empty main streets outnumber the eclectic ones by at least ten to one, and Lewisburg’s civic leadership is hardly complaining that the its town attracts artists, retirees, and wealthy tourists from larger cities such as Washington DC or Charlotte, many of whom stay at the Greenbrier resort nearby. Only a few other towns in the area can claim any outside attraction whatsoever. But the rare towns like Lewisburg will actually find themselves coming up short in terms of parking, if not for some off-street provision. Where do all these visitors put their cars?

It’s not hard to build a speculative narrative on the terms of the arrangement between the City of Lewisburg and United Methodist Church. In the past twenty years or so, the main street began to reawaken, no doubt in part because of the picturesque setting, coupled with a largely intact building stock. Entrepreneurs with an artistic flair found an optimal setting to ply their trades, thanks to commercial real estate that had faltered after the nearby Interstate 64 vacuumed all the conventional businesses away from Washington Street, the principal artery, and into strip malls and big boxes, at the juncture of U.S. Highway 219 and the aforementioned interstate (where chains such as Wal-Mart, Bob Evans, and Arby’s remain today). The Greenbrier golf resort provided a reliably moneyed clientele nearby, while the New River Community College and West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine contributed a captive student population that added to the town’s diverse client base, with a crowd that is more likely to demand certain businesses remaining open in the late evenings, after classes have ended. But Lewisburg’s success as a tourist center faced a growing threat through the scarcity of parking during the seasons when the town was most popular. Clearly no mass transit is likely to serve this rural area any time soon, so what could the town do? It would have been imprudent to sacrifice any more buildings in the National Register Historic District to transform into parking lots, and the most obvious space where traditional architecture had clearly already met its demise—in the photo below—seemed far more aesthetically lucrative as a pocket park than a parking lot.

(In a town such as Lewisburg, aesthetics could trump an obvious source of revenue like an off-street parking facility, because the character and physical appearance matter just as much.)


The solution? Lewisburg United Methodist came calling, and the City and Church forged an agreement. As I’ve mentioned before, churches are often an unfavored presence in a retail environment, not because they make bad neighbors, but because they keep odd hours: they generally fail to draw any patronage during the weekday 8 to 5 time frame that other businesses remain open. But this makes it even more perfect for the church to lease its parking lot to the City, because the parking needs of the congregation and visitors to the town rarely will rarely impinge upon one another. The relationship could hardly be more symbiotic: mainline Protestant churches such as United Methodist are often facing declining membership and could use the cash, and the agreement prevents the city from seeking costlier parking solutions through a purely private provider. It’s hard to charge for public parking in a town the size of Lewisburg in rural West Virginia; the goal of the City is not revenue through parking, but sustained tourism by letting the visitors get out of their cars.

Lewisburg United Method Church’s presence in the town has proven serendipitous. This parking agreement between the two entities should in no way violate the Establishment Clause since it has nothing to do with the exercise of religious faith; a church-state separation controversy would barely register on anyone’s radar. Such a solution may fall exclusively in the domain of small towns, since many urban churches in large cities lack parking lots altogether and parking demand is but one of many barriers to downtown desirability. But in niche markets such as this, the public/non-profit partnership offers humble means of addressing a problem that could help prolong the prosperity of both Lewisburg and its coterie of Methodists for many years to come.