Boston can be one rough ride

On a chilly afternoon, Andy Washburn, 39, waits for a bus in Jamaica Plain. He has used a wheelchair since he was 6, due to a form of muscular dystrophy. Washburn has only limited use of his arms, and he guides the battery-powered chair with a small joystick control.

Soon, a bus arrives. It is one of the new, kneeling variety with automated wheelchair ramps that Washburn says are more reliable than lifts in the older buses. And yet, this afternoon, the ramp fails to unfold. The driver gets up and kicks at it. She tries to jimmy it with her keys, but it won't budge. She then pulls the bus closer to the curb, inch by shuddering inch. But this doesn't work either. Finally, the driver gives up and pulls away, leaving Washburn to hope for better luck with the next bus.

According to many advocates for the disabled, such frustrations are still common for people with disabilities in Boston. Early last month, talks broke down between the MBTA and a group accusing them of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990. Pretrial hearings are scheduled to begin in federal court April 12.

And while public transportation is a core issue for the more than 200,000 Bostonians who said they had a disability on the 2000 US Census, far more goes into making a city truly accessible. Bostonians with disabilities say the city has come a long way since the ADA was passed, but many still give the city mixed grades in terms of its overall accessibility. In 1992, Boston completed an ADA-required ''Transition Plan" to address citywide accessibility barriers, and after a dozen years is now in the midst of a reassessment. The 26-volume plan examined about a dozen specific areas, from libraries and municipal buildings to parks and schools -- although not the MBTA, which does not fall under the city's jurisdiction. This summer the city is planning to take another look at libraries and possibly schools under a department-by-department reassessment that began last summer with the parks department. No time frame for completion has been set.

Matters of designWashburn works at a design consultancy in South Boston called Adaptive Environments. His current project is part of a federal program to dispense advice on ADA compliance via a toll-free number. How steep can an access ramp be? How should grab bars be situated in toilet stalls?

Near the end of a recent workday, Washburn prepares to head home. In colder months, he often books a pickup with the MBTA's door-to-door van service for people with disabilities known as The Ride. But this particular evening, Washburn has agreed to ''walk" -- his term -- to Downtown Crossing and take the Orange Line home to Jamaica Plain in order to demonstrate what it's like to navigate the city from the perspective of a person with a disability.

A woman who works with Washburn helps him put on his jacket, black fleece cap, and green-checkered scarf while seeking his opinion on a municipality inquiring about access requirements for upcoming public performances.

''We get a lot of calls on what the law requires," Washburn explains. ''But unless [that person] is disabled himself, he might not know what those specifications are for or about how it's supposed to work for a disabled person."

In addition, Washburn sometimes moves the conversation beyond technical specifics and code compliance to something known as ''universal design," a theory of design that seeks to accommodate a wide range of physical ability.

Before heading into the elevator and then out onto Congress Street to make his way home, Washburn gives a few examples.

''Take curb cuts," he says. ''It's not uncommon to see a mom with a kid in a stroller, or somebody on inline skates use them. Another example is lever door handles. They're just easier to use than doorknobs, whether you're disabled or whether you just have a large load of groceries in your arms."

Washburn heads up Congress Street without much trouble, moving down one curb cut and up another. Just before crossing Fort Point Channel, however, he points out an access ramp he uses to get onto the bridge. In winter, he says, the ramp is often blocked by plowed snow or a parked car. It's the sort of thing able-bodied people rarely notice, like the inch-and-a-half lip of concrete and steel at the center of the bridge's sidewalk.

''This is negotiable, but it's not terribly well-maintained," says Washburn as he rolls over the lip with a jolt.

Once over the bridge, Washburn heads toward South Station along a relatively new brick sidewalk behind the Federal Reserve building. Brick sidewalks often pose problems. Older, poorly maintained, or badly fitted bricks make a jarring surface for those who use wheelchairs and a tripping hazard for anyone who has difficulty walking. In Washburn's case, a bad bump could knock his feet off his wheelchair's footrests or his hand from its controls, leaving him immobile until some passerby comes to his aid. Last September, a group of Bostonians with disabilities protested the city's plan to replace the concrete sidewalks on a long stretch of Huntington Avenue with brick, to no avail.

But Washburn reserves his harshest criticism for Boston's quaint cobblestones -- ''inherently evil."

''It's brutal for people in wheelchairs," he says. ''But really, it's bad for everybody -- older folks, women in heels."

After heading up through the crowds on Summer Street, Washburn demonstrates by moving onto a cobblestone crosswalk near Downtown Crossing. ''You see," he says, his voice chattering with the bumpy ride, ''I get right off it as quickly as I can." He abandons the crosswalk for the street.

The director of Boston's Commission for Persons with Disabilities, Steve Spinetto, who lost his right leg in a boating accident and walks with a prosthetic limb, agrees that cobblestone surfaces are ''horrible."

''The walking surface of the city is our biggest hurdle, and if I could wave a magic wand, that's what I'd fix first," he says. ''We are a walking city, after all."

Spinetto says that maintaining surfaces of any kind in a large and aging Northeastern city like Boston is a never-ending and expensive chore. But, he says, the city has accomplished much on other fronts, including increased accessibility to community centers and improving library resources for those with visual or hearing impairments.

''Also, our special events people have been terrific," he says. ''They work very hard to make sure that when special events are held, from the Patriots rally to First Night, that those are accessible in every way possible."

Of all the accessibility improvements in Boston, Spinetto is proudest of the ramps installed in recent years to the docks used by the city's ferries and water taxis, ramps that must accommodate the rise and fall of 9-foot tides.

Overall, he says, Boston has met ''or surpassed" most of the goals in the 1992 Transition Plan. The plan called for the accessibility modifications it enumerated to be completed by 1995, a date largely viewed as a spur to progress rather than a firm deadline. Nevertheless, until now, there has been no comprehensive reassessment of the city's accessibility.

''I think it [will] be a tremendously positive thing to update the transition plan," says Bill Henning, executive director of the Boston Center for Independent Living, a service center for people with disabilities. ''No municipality is going to have all kinds of cash to fix every issue, but to look at it and figure out where things stand and in terms of planning just stands to reason."

'A whole new ballgame' From a platform at the Orange Line's Haymarket station, Washburn, along with a woman with a baby stroller, take an elevator that smells slightly of urine up to the street level. He emerges and is soon moving over the cobblestone and flagstone that surrounds Quincy Market, then the bumpy brick expanse of City Hall Plaza.

''I don't want to give the impression that whenever I try to get anywhere that it's all about strife and trouble and misery all the time," says Washburn, who moved here from New Hampshire eight years ago. ''I definitely have much more independence here, because of the public transportation. It's not perfect, but the fact that it actually exists is really a whole new ballgame from New Hampshire in terms of mobility."

It doesn't take long for those imperfections to emerge. Back at Haymarket station, the elevator that was used just an hour earlier is now out of service. Luckily, there's a second elevator. But when the train pulls up, a gap between it and the platform prevents Washburn from boarding. He has to ask that the train be held until he finds an entrance lined up well enough for his wheelchair.

The class-action lawsuit heading to federal court this month accuses the MBTA of a ''systematic failure" to provide basic transportation for the disabled, alleging elevators are often ''soiled with urine or feces" or broken (citing 1,900 reported breakdowns in 2003), along with allegations of broken wheelchair lifts on buses and drivers regularly failing to assist riders with disabilities or announcing stops.

While declining comment on pending litigation, MBTA spokesman Joe Pesaturo said the T is making efforts to ensure its system is accessible for riders with disabilities.

Since 1990 when the ADA was passed, the MBTA has spent $1.6 billion on accessibility-related improvements, he said. In 1990, only 26 of the MBTA's 80 busiest stations were wheelchair accessible; today, 69 of these ''key stations" are. In addition, the budget and ridership of The Ride continue to grow, he said, while complaints, which spiked to nearly 4,000 in 2000, have dropped steadily since, down to about 1,500 in fiscal year 2003.

James Oliver, chairman of the Access Advisory Committee, which reviews the accessibility of MBTA services and initiatives, adds that the suggestions made by his committee are usually accommodated by the MBTA.

''You have disagreements sometimes. But with disagreements comes progress," says Oliver. ''We have been very satisfied with them."

Access about attitudesBeyond physical barriers, Washburn says, a community's accessibility is often as much about attitudes.

He cites a caf in his neighborhood where the workers know him and come out from behind the counter to bring him food and the straw they know he needs to drink his coffee.

''I can tell they appreciate me and my business," says Washburn. ''Even if they're not perfectly accessible, they'll go the extra yard to make it work for me."

Indeed, no matter what the city's reassessments reveal, most agree that the ADA is itself an evolutionary policy that can't be neatly fulfilled within a given time frame.

''The ADA was primarily a federal statement that we should do what we can to accommodate people with disabilities. It's empowered a population of people with disabilities and opened the eyes of the general population," argues Henning of the Boston Center for Independent Living.

Washburn summarizes the mixed grades Boston gets for its ease of access.

''I think there are good access features in Boston as well as bad. Like any large city, it's a mixed bag." An accessible city for him means ''that even with my disability, I can get out and do what I want to do and know that I'm going to have options."

In short, as a bumper sticker created by one disability advocacy group quips, ''To Boldly Go Where Everyone Else Has Gone Before."