I was under the impression that these were also required in order to receive federal funding for repaving the streets. I have no citation or anything to back this up — but I thought I read that a while back.

What he didn’t mention was that the project was held up in Old City because residents objected that the design would damage their property values by not matching the neighborhood. So it was back to the drawing board spending more $$$ to figure out a solution that would appease them.

Your stimulus dollars at work, I mean waste. Many of these were just replaced during the Street Administration. It’s not rocket science to put a dome strip like that into an existing sidewalk, without replacing the whole thing. But Union guys from NJ need new trucks, and our stimulus dollars should pay for them to have new trucks, because that’s American!

You guys must be having a slow day by bringing up a Stu Bykofsky story.

How exactly do these bumps make wheelchair or motorized scooter travel easier?
Many wheelchair users simply use the street and avoid the sidewalks altogether, since the sidewalks are in such poor condition.

I believe there is some truth to this. I also heard that the city had funding that they were just going to lose if they didn’t spend it on this by a certain date.

You are partially correct. The federal ADA rules require that all repaving jobs, federally funded or not, have these bumps now. It just sucks for the city that they spent all that money in the past putting in corner cuts that aren’t good enough any more.

As for complaints about the ponding on the new ramps, I would ask Mr. Bykofsky to demonstrate which ramps he is taking about. He is always so negative about everything that I never believe it can be as bad as he says. In my personal experience in Center City only two ramps pond after rain and both are old corner cuts.

Not at all! We’ve been thinking about this one for months, actually, and the Bykofsky story just served as a nice lead-in.

We’ve seen a couple of ramps in Graduate Hospital, on 20th and 21st Sts with the ponding problem.

Good to know. Are these on streets which have been repaved, too? Or on streets that have yet to be repaved after the new corners? I know they don’t pay much attention to the water flow if the road is going to be repaved anyway, but if the road has also been repaved and there is still ponding that is extra bad.

My advice would be to take pictures and send an email to somebody in the Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities. If state or private contractors did the work the city is sometimes able to get some repairs done or paid for. If it was internal work, well, that’s another bummer. And call 311 every time it rains and ponds.

West Passyunk Avenue is definitely a lot safer after this project. Not only did they add these new ramps, but they expanded the intersection corners further out into the street. This way it does not feel like your crossing six lanes of traffic to get to the other side of the street.

The feds can’t pay for these because that money has been earmarked for productive uses like the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, on drugs, and farm welfare.

IIRC, it’s not just about the truncated domes. I believe many of the existing ramps also don’t conform to ADA regulations regarding the width and slope of the ramp, so the whole thing needs to be dug, re-graded, etc. so that this is about more than just dropping in these dome strips.

The truncated domes are note expensive. Redoing the curbs and sidewalks at four corners of an intersection is expensive.

There is no excuse for shoddy building which allows for pooling. Streets repaving and curbs need to work together to fix that.

Old City or Society Hill? Society Hill has different sidewalks than the rest of the city as they are constructed with brick, not cement. This caused a delay in Society Hill and for good reason. That area would have looked horrible if all the brick corners were replaced in cement. Furthermore, the new grading caused issues with many of the homes on the corner since the bottoms of their brick façades needed to be protected with new berms at the base.

The replacement of these corners is not really a waste as Philly has awful sidewalks due to it’s regressive policy of having the homeowner maintain them and not the Streets department. The biggest problem with this project is no one is challenging the labor costs. I’ve regularly seen 5 or 6 workers working on one corner, often with half idle while the other half works. That seems to be the main factor driving up costs per intersection.

Not to mention that the corners are redone by several different teams, each responsible for one particular aspect of the replacement- this includes, survey, demo, demo cleanup, leveling, curb install, pavement pour and dome install, temporary pavement fill, corner milling, and corner repaving. Each team usually has extra men, each of whom are getting paid full-time dollars (plus overtime for rush jobs). And we wonder why we’re broke.

I believe the term you’re looking for is “democracy.”

The intersections aren’t being rebuilt for the dome strips. The dome strips are a part of the rebuilding.

Exactly. I have no problem paying higher wages for skilled union folk… but man, if they are skilled they should be able to do all the jobs you mention above. They should also be able to do it with half of the resources. This is why we can’t have nice things Philly! Bring your labor costs in check!

2008 Obama stimulus? He wasn’t sworn into office until 2009, but thanks Frank.

And as “whatever” mentions below, this was lawsuit-driven. Even if it weren’t, I’d much rather pay to reinvest in my own country’s infrastructure than go and muck up one thousands of miles away.

That and the implementation. They added them to most of the intersections on 23rd, but not all. The result is that you still can’t walk down the sidewalk using only the curb cuts.