Woman waits 7 years for safer crossing

Published 12:00 am Saturday, June 6, 2015

Nancy Stevens was the first blind woman to climb the nearly 14,000-foot Grand Teton.

But crossing the stretch of asphalt separating the north curb from the south curb of NE Wells Acres Road nearly killed her.

It’s a tricky spot for Stevens, who lives nearby, as Daggett Lane forms the stem of a T-shaped intersection with Wells Acres right near a bus stop served by a route that goes downtown. Up until last month, throughout the whole intersection, the asphalt was blank, offering no signal to drivers to slow down.

“I would just stand there and wait for the silences and hope there were no cars,” said Stevens, who uses a guide dog. “Eventually, I would just run across to get to the bus stop. Because of the shape, it’s hard to tell which way a car is going to turn. One winter, I ran across and slipped on ice. I was lying there and worried I’d be killed.”

Last month, the city of Bend made the crossing less perilous, installing a striped crosswalk and raised pedestrian island. Those who encounter such challenges can file barrier removal requests with the city. Many can be fixed quickly, city staff said, with the installation of a sign or the smoothing of a bumpy patch of sidewalk.

Some fixes aren’t so easy — Stevens first contacted the city about the intersection after moving to Bend in 2008.

“I’ve had three friends who are blind who have been hit,” Stevens said. “One of them, she was pulling a 4-year-old in a wagon and had her guide dog and the driver said they just didn’t see them. How could she not seem them? It makes me nervous, the way people multitask when they drive. And if you think about the high school over on 27th Street, you have new drivers coming on through. There were a lot of factors that made me nervous.”

On Tuesday, Stevens and a number of friends went to the intersection to celebrate, and it soon became clear the crossing worked. Where cars use to speed by at 45 mph, they now came to a stop just at the sight of people standing near the new crosswalk.

Darwin Simtustus, a visually impaired man who lives nearby and was the first to show up for the celebration, noted how incredible it was to hear cars stopping as he stood on the side of the road.

“I don’t remember this ever happening before,” he said.

Stevens’ problem with Wells Acres Road isn’t unique. In 2004, the city reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice that required it to update its infrastructure to federal standards. Over the next 10 years, the city spent about $8 million to reach compliance. The case is now closed despite a backlog of work, though the city has committed to completing the work.

Karin Morris, the city’s accessibility manager, attended the celebration and noted it was a complicated intersection.

“Just putting in a crosswalk doesn’t necessarily make a place safer,” Morris said Thursday. “There needs to be other enhancements, like compliant curb ramps, which we had to add before this all came together. All the research says there will be no safety enhancements without this other work.”

Morris joined the city in 2013 and says she has no idea why the improvement wasn’t made before her tenure. However, Morris noted she’s been working on this project for months, a process which required traffic studies and multiple designs.

“I didn’t have the bandwidth to do all that research immediately and get away from my other duties, but we kept looking at it and working,” she said. “I’m not an engineer, but I drew up some ideas, and we had an intern who was able to draw something up and have it revised.”

One of the challenges concerned firetrucks that may have to turn at the intersection and which could be obstructed by the island. Morris met with the Bend Fire Department and found a design that both offered protection to pedestrians and left room for a firetruck.

Morris says she has her “fingers crossed” that a project manager position the city created and is hiring for will help her office speed up its work in the future. In addition to the new position, the city’s proposed biennial budget dedicates $400,000 more to accessibility construction than during the last biennium. This month, Morris will propose to the City Council an approach where the city focuses on making entire corridors accessible, instead of taking a more patchwork approach.

“We want to look at making sure there’s consistent east-west and north-south connectivity,” Morris said. “We don’t want to fix a ramp or sidewalk only to lead to another blocked path or missing piece of sidewalk. This work won’t be cheap, but one advantage is you can split the work into phases.”

The top-priority corridor, Morris noted, includes the Wells Acre intersection.

Stevens said she’s aware the city has funding limitations, but she thinks “there was too much resistance to getting this fixed.”

“I’m very grateful it finally got done, but what makes me curious is, they say they have to do all these studies and see if it’s practical, but they have a pedestrian signal on the corner of Brinson (Boulevard) and Butler Market (Road), and there’s not even a bus stop there,” she said.

Stevens emphasized the crosswalk and island aren’t only there to make the street safer for her, but for anyone living nearby, including the kids coming and going from nearby Ensworth Elementary.

“Last week I used the crosswalk with my housemate to go up to Pine Nursery (Park), and there’s a canal trail, and I just love it,” Stevens said. “I want to be able to walk it and figure out how to access it. There’s this really cool picnic table and now I know where I’m going to be going. I wouldn’t have thought about it, but now I have all these new routes around the neighborhood. I hope more people in the neighborhood will now feel they can walk to the park, too.”

— Reporter: 541-633-2160, tleeds@bendbulletin.com