U.S. Supreme Court declines to hear Arlington ADA case
In what could be a major financial blow to the nation’s cities, the U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear an appeal by the city of Arlington to block a lawsuit by a quadriplegic suing over the lack of accessible sidewalks and curb cuts.
Richard Frame, a quadriplegic for 12 years, sued the city of Arlington alleging that when it built or altered sidewalks and curbs in some areas, it did not make them accessible, violating Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Other plaintiffs from Arlington joined the suit, alleging problems such as missing or badly sloped curb ramps; impassable, noncontiguous, broken or nonexistent sidewalks; and inadequate handicapped parking that made it difficult for them to go about their everyday lives.
“The court’s decision was right for the city, for Texas and for the country,” said David Ferleger, the attorney from Philadelphia who was representing Frame before the court. “Keeping people with disabilities off sidewalks is immoral, bad public policy and harmful to the national economy.”
But city officials dealing with tight budgets say they are concerned about the costs of making the necessary repairs and changes to thousands of miles of sidewalks and other public structures.
The National League of Cities argues that local officials should be able to determine when to make repairs, such as when to make sidewalks accessible, without federal mandates.
Lars Etzkorn, who works on federal relations for the league, was disappointed that the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Earlier, Etzkorn said it was impossible to estimate the ultimate cost to cities, but he said it would be in the millions of dollars at a time when essential services, such as police and fire protection and libraries, are being cut in many places.
“Certainly, accessibility is important and the ability for all citizens to use resources of a city is important. But how a city chooses to spend its scarce funding should be left up to those accountable to their citizens instead of being forced upon by a federal court interpreting the Americans with Disabilities Act,” he said.
Etzkorn said it’s possible that the Supreme Court could choose to hear sidewalk accessibility cases in the future if there is a split in how circuit courts rule.
For instance, plaintiffs in Los Angeles recently filed a lawsuit against Los Angeles similar to the Arlington case in which they asked the city to to invest in making the sidewalks accessible, he said.
Now the case returns to district court where it would be determined which sidewalks are accessible and which are not, Ferleger said.
Frame, who became a quadriplegic after a 1999 car wreck, sued Arlington, claiming that the city violated the federal law by continuing to build inaccessible sidewalks. His original lawsuit concerned better access around two downtown hospitals.
A federal district court dismissed the case, saying Frame had waited too long after the work had been completed to sue, and initially a panel of judges at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans agreed. But a rehearing of the case by the full court, vacated that decision.
The majority opinion by the 5th Circuit stated that cities are to use “any and all means” to make sidewalks accessible. Though the court wrote that a city’s obligation is not “boundless” and that a city should not be forced to take on undue financial burden, it can “avoid liability whenever it chooses simply by building sidewalks right the first time or by fixing its original unlawful construction.”
California has 24 million licensed drivers and, according to the Los Angeles Times, will issue 2.1 million permanent placards this year. That’s a significant increase over the 1.2 million placards issued just a decade ago. Furthermore, about 621,000 of nearly 6 million licensed drivers in Los Angeles County have placards.
According to state motor vehicle officers, fraudulent use of the placards is rising:
With 1 in 10 California drivers now legally registered to carry the passes, transportation experts say abuse has become commonplace. At any given moment, on any given street, more than a third of the vehicles displaying the tags — and parking without paying — are doing so illegally, say officials with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.
Cracking down on parking meter cheaters
They use disabled-driver placards that they don’t deserve. But thanks to the LAPD and DOT, some of them get the hefty fines they really do deserve.
As the scoundrels arrived to look for parking, little did the unsuspecting offenders of decency know that an undercover sting had been set up to ruin their day.
I’d written two columns on the fraudulent use of disabled-driver placards in downtown Los Angeles, and the city’s Department of Transportation was swooping in for a crackdown. My only regret was that department chief Jaime de la Vega claimed he had other things to do, so there went my chance of riding shotgun with him in his Hummer.
We gathered at 6:30 a.m. Friday. My fellow crime busters included DOT officials and undercover officers and Councilman Dennis Zine, who had arranged for an LAPD unit to join the operation. Zine, a former cop who’s running for city controller, was eager to bust anyone who’d fake a disability to park free all day, robbing the city of badly needed revenue.
On Friday, the action was light at 4th and Hill streets. Having run my own stakeouts, I recommended that we move the operation to Grand Avenue between 2nd and 4th streets, and let me tell you something: I ought to be in line for a consulting contract. It was easy pickings up there.
Two undercover cops from DOT worked the street while Zine and I, along with the DOT suits, held back. We tried to look inconspicuous, but with Zine, it’s like you’re out there with Kojak, and the red jacket he was wearing wasn’t exactly camouflage. Fortunately, even Barney Fife could have handled this job.
Right around 8 a.m., a woman in a black Honda Civic pulled into a metered space on the east side of Grand, near the Museum of Contemporary Art, and hung a blue placard. You never know for sure who’s cheating, because not all disabilities are obvious. But when DOT sergeants Manny Garcia and Jessie Dyar ran a check, they learned that the placard was issued to someone other than the driver.
“It’s my aunt’s,” the driver told me, claiming she had dropped her off at court.
It’s OK to use a disabled person’s placard to drop off or pick up that person and park within “reasonable proximity.”
But was this driver parking for the day to go to work?
“No comment,” said the woman, who was in her late 30s.
Check out this new company that scans books for only $1 per book. Having a book scanned into an electronic copy is something that can be very useful for anyone in a wheelchair. 1Dollarscan.
Steve Lopez at the LA Times just published two great articles about handicapped placard fraud and abuse in Los Angeles. Check them out and see what you think.
A peculiar parking pattern: A high number of cars parked at downtown L.A. meters carry disabled placards that let owners park for free.
It’s time for a crackdown on abusers of disabled placards: Los Angeles needs to take tough action, and California should at least require that the drivers get a doctor’s signature every two years. Physicians could be more discriminating too.
Parking Mobility is a community-based non-profit organization which brings citizens and their cities together to address disabled parking abuse. We believe that the best individuals to report disabled parking abuse are the individuals who need disabled parking for their daily activities.
Regardless of how well any one city enforces their disabled parking spaces, their enforcement agents (police, etc) cannot be everywhere…all the time. And in cases where a violation is called in to a city, most often enforcement agents cannot arrive at the location in time to ticket the offender. People with disabilities see disabled parking abuse because we look for it everywhere we go.
The Parking Mobility application empowers private citizens to report a violation with 3 quick and simple photos. The report is immediately sent to the city, and the city tickets the vehicle using the violation report. When the city collects the fine, your favorite charity receives 20% of the fine!
And your city not only improves accessibility for its citizens, it collects a fine that it would not have received without Parking Mobility and you!
The Manfrotto Magic Arm + Super Clamp Kit is designed to hold fixtures and devices securely in place in a variety of situations. The rotating elbow arm, with a locking lever control at the pivot allows positioning a fixture at just the right height and angle. Accepts any fixture up to 6.6 lbs that has a baby 5/8″ (16mm) receptor.
- When coupled with the Wallee Connect Kit, The Magic Arm + Super Clamp allow for mounting the iPad to a tripod leg, light stand or other convenient location within the photo workflow. This collective system will work in many uses outside the photography realm as well.
- Stand arm on the floor or a table with an optional Backlite base accessory.
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- The Magic Arm integrates well with the Super Clamp (included). Enables mounting on any round pipe or flat shelf from 1/2 – 2″ in diameter or thickness.
http://www.latimes.com/health/la-he-brain-machine-20111006,0,7089239.story
latimes.com
Body suit may soon enable the paralyzed to walk
An international research team announces it has taken a key step toward achieving its goal of a ‘prosthetic exoskeleton’ that a quadriplegic could command by brain power.
By Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times
October 6, 2011
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In a busy lab at Duke University, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis is merging brain science with engineering in a bid to create something fantastical: a full-body prosthetic device that would allow those immobilized by injury to walk again.
On Wednesday, Nicolelis and an international group of collaborators declared that they had cleared a key hurdle on the path toward that goal, demonstrating they could bypass the body’s complex network of nerve endings and supply the sensation of touch directly to the brains of monkeys.
Nicolelis and his collaborators — engineers, neuroscientists and physiologists from Brazil, Switzerland, Germany and the United States — are working toward an ambitious objective: On the opening day of the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil, they hope to send a young quadriplegic striding out to midfield to open the games, suited up in the “prosthetic exoskeleton” they aim to build.
Nicolelis, a Brazilian-born physician and neuroscientist with a tinkerer’s bent, calls that goal a “Brazilian moon shot.” And as with moon shots of the past, his team has recruited a monkey — in fact, two female rhesus monkeys named Mango and Nectarine — to go first.
The latest experiment of the nonprofit consortium showed that electrical messages conveying sensation could be sent directly to the monkeys’ brains — in enough detail that both animals could distinguish among three identical circles by virtually “feeling” their differing textures.
Those sensations did not come from the animals’ fingers, but from specially coded electrical currents delivered straight to each monkey’s sensory cortex by four filaments the breadth of a hair.
Although no one really knows (and the monkeys are unlikely to tell us) whether one circle felt like sandpaper and another felt as smooth as glass, Mango and Nectarine quickly learned to discern one circle from another to complete a task and get their reward: a sip of juice.
The experiment was reported Wednesday in a letter published by the journal Nature.
For a person with a spinal cord injury, sending such orchestrated bursts of electrical information to the brain could do more than allow a patient who has lost sensation to experience the pleasures of touch again. It could provide the necessary sensory feedback for the user of a prosthetic walker to navigate uneven terrain and steer clear of dangers such as hot or slippery surfaces.
The group’s latest effort builds upon an earlier accomplishment, in 2003, in which monkeys learned to move a cursor to designated targets on a computer screen using thought alone.
In another experiment, first described in 2008, Nicolelis’ team at Duke showed that monkeys could learn to initiate movement with their thought patterns and command a robotic device across the world in a Japanese robotics lab to walk in real time.
That development was a key step in creating a prosthetic device that could be controlled by a person incapable of voluntary movement below the neck. Now, by adding sensory feedback, the latest experiment creates a loop of command and control that could make the complex act of walking possible.
Dr. Bruce Volpe, a professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College who is not involved in the consortium — which its members have dubbed the Walk Again Project — praised the latest advance. He called it a “remarkable use of sensory information” that “opens novel … possibilities” for patients who have lost movement and sensation to injury or illness.
Following injury or stroke, patients’ recoveries are often hampered by the “noisy, unresponsive or absent sensory information” making its way to their brains, said Volpe, who studies and develops interactive robotic training devices for the rehabilitation of such patients.
“These data suggest new options for generating that missing and crucially informative sensory information,” he said.
The Walk Again Project is one of many research efforts aimed at restoring movement and repairing tissue in those who have suffered grievous spinal cord injury. Though much of that work has focused on the use of stem cells to regenerate nerve and muscle fiber, advances in neuroscience have made the idea of “neural prosthetics” keenly attractive.
UCLA physiologist V. Reggie Edgerton, who was not involved in Nicolelis’ work but has pioneered the use of electrical stimulation to initiate movement in paralyzed patients, said that the brain’s innate flexibility — its ability to take in electrical signals and learn to attach meaning to them — makes approaches like that of the Walk Again Project highly promising.
Although the information conveyed to the monkeys’ brains in Nicolelis’ lab was not fine-grained, the experiment demonstrated that “sensory feedback and brain control devices can be combined in real time and in a useful way,” said Kip Ludwig, who directs the program on brain repair and plasticity at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which has funded some of Nicolelis’ work. “Before, they’ve always been separate.”
“Ideally, the long-term goal would be a prosthetic that would send all the sensory information — touch, position, temperature — to the arm that goes into, say, drinking a cup of coffee,” Ludwig added. “This is an important step, but there’s a lot of work yet to be done.”
In demonstrating the feasibility of their ideas on nonhuman primates first, Nicolelis said the team is starting with approaches that are fundamentally simple. He added that when the experiments move to a human, he or she will not only learn quickly how to initiate and repeat movements using thought alone, but the prosthetic should interface so seamlessly with the intelligent human brain that the patient will begin to see the prosthetic as a natural extension of himself or herself.
“We are trying to provide the patient a new body, and we believe the patient’s brain will assimilate the new body as part of the sense of self of the patient,” Nicolelis said. “It would be just like a car … only a little tighter.”
The FREE 5th annual DisAbility Sports Festival will be held at Cal State San Bernardino on Saturday, Oct. 1, 2011 from 9a.m. – 3:30p.m. It is free for people with ANY disability and ANY age. Last year, we had 600 participants ages 8 months to 84 years old. This year, we expect to have 700 participants including 100 veterans at the free festival. Please register fast as spaces will fill. We will introduce the participants to at least 20 different sports with most sports being coached by an elite internationally competing athlete with a disability. We also provide free breakfast and lunch to all the participants and t-shirts to all those who pre-register. Supporters of the athletes will have the opportunity to purchase their own lunches at the festival. We will also have over 30 information booths about other community programs and services available for people with disabilities and their families. In all, we expect to have 1500-2000 people attend the festival.
Our keynote speaker during Opening Ceremonies will be James “Will” Wilson, Navy Master Chief (retired) who will climb Mt. McKinley this summer along with several other veterans with disabilities and is the adapted sports coordinator for Navy Safe Harbor. Please help us spread the word so that we can reach our goals of 700 participants and 100 military personnel. We would love for you to come out!
To find more information about the festival and to register to participate, please go to www.disabilitysportsfestival.org (in construction) As always, if you have any special needs or further concerns or questions, feel free to contact the DisAbility Sports Festival Office at the contact information below.
Ralph’s Riders is hosting our Annual Tropicana Havana Nights Gala, October 29 2011.
Date: Saturday, October 29, 2011
6:00pm – 8:00pm: Rum Bar, Blackjack, Silent Auction and Boutique
8:00pm – 11:00pm: Dinner, Awards Presentation, Live Music and Dancing
Location: Sony Pictures Plaza, 10000 West Washington Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232
Price: $150/Person (ticket and dinner included, cash bar)
Click here to buy tickets!
Ralph’s Riders was at the Casa Colina Land Meets Sea Camp in Long Beach. Here is a photo of several of our Riders.
Our new website will be very dynamic and very interactive. We plan on updating it several times a week with news from Ralph’s Riders, events around Southern California and all kinds of information that is useful to people living with spinal cord injury and paralysis. So be sure to check back often.
Thanks for stopping by!
Ralph’s Riders Foundation