99% Invisible - 308- Curb Cuts (Repeat)

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

If you live in an American city and you don’t personally use a wheelchair, it's easy to overlook the small ramp at most intersections, between the sidewalk and the street. Today, these curb cuts are everywhere, but fifty years ago -- when an activist named Ed Roberts was young -- most urban corners featured a sharp drop-off, making it difficult for him and other wheelchair users to get between blocks without assistance.Curb Cuts plus a special announcement from Roman Mars about the future of 99pi.

Hello beautiful nerds, I have a big announcement. After 10 years of being an independent production, with our 10th year probably being our biggest ever, putting out three special projects, Benoves and a best-selling book, I've decided to sell the show to Sirius XM, specifically to Stitcher, which is their podcast company. The same 99PI crew are going to make the show, I'm still going to host it, where our own editorial unit, it still be available anywhere to everyone. If you're subscribed now, you will stay subscribed. It's the same show. Someone else just collects the ad money and guides the business stuff. You'll never notice the sound of anything different, except I get to be involved more.

So much of my job has become running a business and not making a podcast. I desperately needed that to change. I chose Stitcher as my new partner because I already knew, trusted, and respected everyone there. The ball got rolling when I called Colin Anderson. He's the VP of Comedy at Irwolf, they're a part of Stitcher. I literally signed his paperwork a decade ago

for him to work in this country. He was unfurlough from the Comedy Production Group at BBC Radio, and I signed the paperwork for him to work at KLW in San Francisco. And then he hooked me up with Natalie Moellum, the VP of business development and she and I hit it off right away because she also happens to be the sister of John Moellum who wrote and performed the amazing song story collaborations, Wild Ones and Jeanne Chance which are like our best episodes ever. So talking to her was like talking to a cousin. And the person who will be my boss is Peter Clowney.

He's the head of original content in Stitcher. And he was my editor 15 years ago. We worked on pilots for public radio. And it's safe to say that if Peter hadn't been my editor then, 99% of visible wouldn't exist today. Then I met a bunch of the serious folks, and a lot of them had never heard of the show before, but by the end of our negotiations, they had heartfelt and insightful comments

about episodes deep in the back catalog that I barely remembered. I like these folks, and you would like them too, but you'll never notice them. They just give me comfort. So what's going to happen with radiotopia? I am so proud of the things that PRX CEO Kerry Hoffman, executive producer Julie Shapiro, network director Audrey Mardovitch, and fundraiser Gina James and all the rest of the behind the scenes crew built with radiotopia. It became more successful than I ever imagined when we dreamed up in a cabin in rural Massachusetts several years ago. I raised money and worked

side by side with amazing podcasters, each of them retaining ownership and control over their own work. Reutopia is a groundbreaking network and nonprofit collective. It has never been a company on purpose, and as such, even though I was the co-founder, I never owned any part of it. I think that was so weird to people that no one really understood it. I still believe in the ongoing mission of radio-topia and the amazing work of PRX and the forefront of public radio, and I hope you continue to support them. I certainly do. I'm personally donating a million dollars to PRX and radio-topia, so they keep going strong. Whatever cliche you have in mind about what happens in an acquisition

when shows move to other networks. This isn't like that. A bunch of people from the PRX and serious teams work together with good intentions to transform a show that needed to evolve for the sake of its creator, and I am grateful for that. And I'm grateful to you for listening. And I am present as well, we'll keep on and grow, and the team will have even more opportunities to make more stuff and spin-offs with the full support of Stitcher and Sirius XM. I'm really excited to collaborate in ways I never imagined.

So thank you, beautiful nerds, for getting us here. And thanks for listening. We were all extremely busy the past couple of weeks, so right now I'm going to play for you a repeat, which is hosted by Delaney Hall, but nothing should be read into that. I'm still the host. This one just happens to be one of my favorite episodes, probably because it was hosted by Delaney Hall. Here you go.

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Delaney Hall, filling in for Roman Mars. In 1997, a curator named Catherine Ott was learning her way around the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She was new to the job, she specialized in medical science, and there was this one storage room in the building where she worked. It's like that classic what you'd think of as a dark, dusty, sort of scary, mildly mysterious storage room in a museum. There were drug jars,

there was parts of mannequin bodies laying around. But the weirdest thing was. There was this wheelchair that had go-cart wheels. It was completely customized. It had a recarrow seat that was used in Porsche cars, but I kept tripping over it and finally I'm like what the heck is this thing? So Catherine Ott started asking around. Where did this wheelchair come from? Why is it in storage? And no one at the castle, which is what the staff calls the main Smithsonian building, could really tell her. Nobody completely understood who had owned it.

It had been left at the door of the castle with a note pinned to it like an orphan in a basket. The note said this was a chair that belonged to Ed Roberts. We think it should be at the Smithsonian. Ed Roberts. I didn't recognize the name. Not yet. If you live in an American city and you don't personally use a wheelchair, you probably don't pay much attention to the small slope at most intersections between the sidewalk

and the street. It's just a ramp, a cut in the curb. They're all over the country now. Just about any place you find sidewalks. That's reporter Cynthia Gourney. But 60 years ago when Ed Roberts, the owner of that wheelchair, was young, the sidewalks at most urban intersections ended with a sharp drop-off. That's enough to stop a person in a wheelchair from reaching the next block without help. And the story of how the first widespread urban curb cuts came to be?

It starts with a movement that demanded society see disabled people in a new way. Ed Roberts was central to that movement and so were the hundreds of people who helped drag his wheelchair up Constitution Avenue right in the middle of Washington DC so it could end up at the Smithsonian. They insisted it was a piece of American history. Ed Roberts grew up in Berlin game near San Francisco. He was the oldest of four boys and he loved to play baseball but one day when he was 14 years old he got

really sick with a fever. Within a few days, he was in the hospital. That's Zona Roberts, Ed's mom. She's 98 now. And within two days of that, he was in rush to an iron lung because he couldn't breathe any more on his own. It had polio. It had damaged his respiratory muscles so much that he needed the iron lung to stay alive.

Iron lungs aren't made anymore, but back in the day, they were these full-body respirators that encased polio survivors in metal up to the neck and pulled air in and out of their lungs. Ed's polio wrecked a lot more than his breathing. It left him paralyzed below the neck. He could move two fingers on his left hand and that was it. His paralysis was permanent. The doctor who told Ed's parents their son had survived his high fever did not present this as good news. He said, well, how would you feel if you had to live in an iron lung the rest of your life? I don't imagine you've ever been in one. I've been in one and it's not a very good way to live. In order to escape the iron lung once in a while, Ed taught himself on his own a technique called frog breathing. That's a deep sea divers trick where you gulp oxygen into your lungs the way a

frog does. For polio survivors whose weakened breathing muscles weren't strong enough to inhale that needed oxygen, frog breathing met a person could get out of the iron lung for short stretches of time. You swallow air like that, you swallow it, and then you can breathe, and they kept telling them to stop it. That was not good for his body, and of course he kept doing it because it kept him alive. And Ed was determined to stay alive on his own terms. Here he is in a 60 minutes interview from 1989. There are very few people, even with the most severe disabilities who can't take control

of their own life. The problem is that people around us don't expect this to. Think about your own life. If you have people taking care of you, making all your decisions, what is in life? Do it. Ed was tenacious, but everything was hard. He needed the iron lung while he was asleep,

but the frog breathing let him leave it for a while during the day. So he stayed in school, going to campus once a week. When Ed did leave the house, his family ran the maneuvers. They were helping him navigate a world that wasn't built for a person in a wheelchair. Ed's brothers or his dad would help lift him into his chair, drag the chair out of the house, and then lift the chair over curbs and up and down stairs. Or if Zona were alone, she would wrangle strangers. I'd have to get somebody help me get the chair up the stairs. So it would be somebody in the back and somebody on the frame and get it up.

Or sometimes it would just be me. Ed graduated from high school then from a local community college. But when he wanted to go on to Berkeley in 1962, the university at first said no. He was just too disabled. And where could he safely live? The iron lung, which he still used every night, wouldn't fit in a dorm room. Until finally, somebody suggested housing him at the campus hospital. A patient's room remade into a living space for Ed and all his equipment.

This is Ed Roberts, five, two, take one, September 15. his equipment. In a series of oral history interviews, much later, Ed remembered what it was like to start as a Berkeley undergrad. What it was like. There's a combination of excitement and scary. An attendant would wheel at D.H. class, and then Ed would recruit a classmate to help him take notes. And I did a certain liquor announcement that he could get a class and usually

find a good looking guy at Woolbert. He'd give the woman a piece of carbon paper. She would take notes during the lecture, and then she'd give the carbon copy back to Ed at the end. It's such a way to take notes during the lecture and then she'd give the carbon copy back to Ed at the end. Ed did so much studying and reading that the mouth wand he used to turn the pages of books started pushing his teeth out of shape. So campus officials saw this experiment was working.

Newspapers wrote stories about Ed. His mom still likes to make fun of the headlines. Help us, cripple, ghost of college, that's one we all love. And then a second quadriplegic student moved into Ed's makeshift hospital dorm. A young man who had been paralyzed in a diving accident and was initially told he should just get used to life

as a shut-in. Then a few more arrived, both to live in the hospital and to find lodgings off campus. The word started to spread. Something unusual was going on at Berkeley. These students had profound and visible disabilities. The state paid special attendance to heft their wheelchairs, up staircases, and visible disabilities. The state paid special attendance to heft their wheelchairs, up staircases,

and intellectual halls. You couldn't miss the new presence on campus. And don't forget, this was the 1960s. Ed went to Berkeley at the same year that James Meredith, a black man, went to University of Mississippi and integrated it. That's a story in Steve Brown. He has a genetic syndrome

that among other things makes his bones break easily, so he's a sometimes wheelchair user and a co-founder of the Institute on Disability Culture. So the 60s were a time of lots of protests and lots of reform and lots of change and you know there's this very technical historical term it was in the air and it was in the air. And it was in the air. It was in the air for disabled people too. That improvised dorm in the campus hospital. Those rooms turned into the headquarters for an exuberant and irreverent group of organizers like Ed and Hale Zuckas, an assertive guy with cerebral palsy

who communicated with a word board and a pointer strapped to his head. They called themselves the rolling quads. And like a few other coalitions of disabled young people around the country, they started using a new kind of language to talk about their needs and rights. The radical idea that people with disabilities had civil rights, the right to education, to jobs, to respect, to real inclusion in public life, this fit right into the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s and early 70s.

And the Berkeley Disabled students had a Berkeley reputation. At that time, it was an explosive place. That's Judy Human, who had polio as a kid back in the 1940s and has used a wheelchair since then. She was a young New York disability rights agitator when she moved to Berkeley for graduate school. It was our responsibility to break down the doors and we had a lot of fun because it was much easier to organize a demonstration in Berkeley, then in Manhattan. You know, so we could get 30 to 50 wheelchair riders to come to City Hall. That's a pretty large number. Notice she said wheelchair riders with a D like bicycle riders. It doesn't really have

the same feel as wheelchair bound, right? And disable people from other parts of the country were coming to Berkeley. To go to school, to look for work, to be a part of a disability vibrant community. I was instantly attracted to them and what they were doing. Debbie Kaplan broke her neck in a diving accident just after college. When she decided to study law, Berkeley admitted her, and Ed and the Rolling Quad said, right away, come work with us. I mean, to people in the disability community, we hung on to each other because we all had this idea about who we were, and nobody else around us did.

You know, I mean, everybody else was stuck in the standard way of thinking about disability back then. What? Charity and public welfare and disability means you can't do anything. Meaning, you know, Jerry Lewis-Telethon. [♪ Music playing in background, you know that we're gonna do a show for you now? 20 hours? Coast to coast? You know that?

Mm-hmm. Okay, now let's see if we can get the people out there to love you too. Okay. All right. The Jerry Lewis-Telethon was the late comedian's annual marathon fundraiser for muscular dystrophy. He mugged for the camera and brought in celebrity singers and spent a lot of time smiling down at cute, well-dressed children in wheelchairs.

The rising generation of disability rights activists hated it. Well, we just would cringe every Memorial Day weekend knowing that all these people were watching Jerry Lewis squeezing money out of people by dramatically playing up the most horrid stereotypes about disability that having a disability is a fate worse than death, that we should be pitted, that if we do anything we are brave and yet really not real people. I knew that the only other time I saw disabled people on TV, we're doing those telephones. This is Laurence Carter Long. He's communications director for the Disability Rights and Education Defense Fund. When Laurence was five, he was a literal poster child for the United Fund charity because he

was born with cerebral palsy and he was cute. I was on the side of buses. I was in fun raising appeals and everybody would go, ah, I think, open up the checkbooks. It wasn't until I got a little bit older when I was in college and I thought, wait a minute, what's the subtext of that? And the subtext was, well, you don't want to end up like this poor kid, do you? Then give us some money.

As an adult, Lawrence would go on to study the way disabled people were portrayed in the movies and on television and generally in the public consciousness. What became very clear is there were certain narratives that got told often, you know, that disability was something that we were to be afraid of, that disabled people were objects of pity. And I remember in 1972 there was a controversy around the Jerry Lewis telephone where Jerry Lewis said, the man upstairs goofed. I think the man upstairs goofed in made a mistake. And I think he put people like myself and all these lovely people with the celebrity phones

here to repair that goof. It rang that bell in my mind in terms of, is that what people think of me? That I'm one of God's mistakes? Back at Berkeley, the Rolling Quads and Ed Roberts in particular were one big antidote to the Jerry Lewis telephone. Ed flirted with women. He got arrested in college for peeing outside a bar.

He told dark jokes about quadriplegia. Like when a doctor told him he was going to be a vegetable. And Ed replied, fine, I'll be in artichoke. Tough and prickly on the outside with a tender heart. A testing counselor once pronounced Ed to be very aggressive. Ed liked recounting his response. Well, if you were paralyzed from the neck down,

don't you think aggressiveness would be an asset? The nature, I think, of access of being included meant that you had to, in some ways, force yourself upon the world and say, we're here. Hey, hey, hey, because the tendency, the programming for the rest of the country, even here in Berkeley at first, was to say, we don't want to see that.

You're going to make those normal people uncomfortable. But by the time Ed Roberts was in graduate school at Berkeley, the disabled students were noticeably, unmistakably, part of the community. Even more so because some were zipping around in power chairs, which had been invented to help wounded veterans, and were starting to be more available to the general public. Ed got really interested in power chairs when he first watched another quadriplegic try one out. And now he had one of these new portable ventilators that attached to his wheelchair. So even though he still used the iron lung at night,

he could stay away from it for a lot longer. And there was a girl. I fell in love. Like many people do. We do that as well. Had it became ridiculously inconvenient to have my attendant pushing me around in my wheelchair with my girlfriend. It was an extra person that I didn't need to be more intimate. With a power chair, a person like Ed would still need an attendant for some things. Not for locomotion though, not to go on a date. I learned how to drive a power wheelchair in one day. I was so motivated.

It had changed in many ways my perception of my disability. To have myself, and she jumped on my lap, and we rode off into the sunset more to the closest more tail. But think about this. For more than a decade you've been able to get around because somebody is behind you pushing your chair. And now you're under your own power. You get to leave that wheelchair attendant behind. But you still have to contend with curbs.

If you're trying to get across the street and there are no curb cuts. Six inches might as well be Mount Everest. Six inches makes all the difference in the world. If you can't get over that curb. These guys could only roll independently once they could get over the curb drop-offs on the way. And yeah, they could go hunt for a driveway, but that's dangerous for somebody in a wheelchair. A driveway sends you right out into traffic. And yeah, they could go hunt for a driveway, but that's dangerous for somebody in a wheelchair.

A driveway sends you right out into traffic. The whole point of a marked intersection is that it shows you this is where it's safe to cross. The power chair riders, actually all the wheelchair riders, needed what we now call curb cuts. Those slopes at the corners that make it easy to roll between sidewalk and street. And here's where it would be great to be able to tell you about the inventor of the curb cut. The clever person who first thought of cutting little ramps,

so people could roll into intersections instead of having to step off curves. But nobody knows who that was. All we know is that they were not a standard feature yet and most intersections, not in Berkeley, not anywhere. Back in the 1940s and 50s, there were a few communities across the country where people had tried to make parts of the built environment more accessible. For example, there was a coach in Illinois working with disabled soldiers who badgered reluctant officials at the University of Illinois. Like, shame on you, these men and women were injured

fighting for us until finally the school set up a rehab and education program on its most important campus with wheelchair sports and wood ramps into buildings. But by the late 1960s and 70s, this new wave of young disabled activists like the Rolling Quads, they weren't gonna wait around for the occasional enlightened college coach. They demanded. They were insistent. They didn't wait for permission. You still hear these stories about the Rolling Quads going out on Commando raids at midnight,

guys in wheelchairs with their attendants using sledgehammers or jackhammers to bust up curbs, build their own ramps, and force the city into action. But the story that there were midnight commandos was a little bit exaggerated, actually. Exaggerated, he said. That's Eric Dibner. In the early 1970s, he was a disabled student's attendant at Berkeley, sort of a rolling quad's fellow traveler. And yeah, he says, maybe a few of them got impatient, maybe they did go poor a few ramps themselves.

We got a bag or two of concrete and mixed it up and took it to the corners that would most ease the route. So that occurred on, I'd say, less than half a dozen corners. Did any of these runs occur at midnight? Yes, they were all done in the under cloak of darkness. It may have been against the law, right? And so you can call them commando raids or whatever. Those commando raids never happened on a grand scale. Instead, most of the progress made by the rolling quads was a little more bureaucratic, a little more how real change often gets made. One day, in 1971, the rolling quads show up at the Berkeley City Council in a posse.

Ed Roberts, who by now is a polypsych grad student, Hail Zuckis, the guy with a pointer and the wordboard who's learned Russian and is finishing a math degree, and all their friends disabled and not. When you picture this, remember that Berkeley's council chambers are not very big. So we really were kind of stunned to see a whole lot of people in wheelchairs wheeling into the council meeting

and saying that they wanted to have curb cuts on every street corner in Berkeley because they needed to get around and they want to be able to get around by themselves. That's Lonnie Hancock, who was a Berkeley City Council member and then the city's mayor before joining the California state legislature.

We were on a stage, as I remember, so we were elevated and the people in wheelchairs were down below us, looking up at us and just looking into their faces and realizing the effort that it took for them to be there and that they were requesting something that had never been done to our knowledge anywhere on Earth. It was an overwhelming sensation, but realizing that it's something that we could do and should do and would do. And so they did the world's first widespreadUTS program. City Council Minutes, September 28, 1971. Hmm. Declaring it to be the policy of the city, that streets and sidewalks be designed and constructed

to facilitate circulation by handicap persons within major commercial areas. That curve cuts be made immediately at 15 specified corners throughout the city. The motion carried unanimously. By the mid-1970s, the Disability Rights Movement was growing and spreading. Groups with a rolling quad sort of attitude

were multiplying around the country and even world. And one adjective was pretty much key to the new movement over the next two decades. Independent. And for everybody in this crusade, the physical fixes list was ambitious, things that had to change in the built environment to make real independence possible. Not just curb cuts, wheelchair lifts on buses, ramps alongside staircases, elevators with reachable buttons in public buildings, and accessible bathrooms. Service counters, low enough to let a person in a wheelchair be attended to face-to-face, respectfully, not peer down at from way on high. So they got to work.

They're tired, they're grubby, they're uncomfortable, but their spirits are soaring. The sin in its San Francisco's H.E.W. headquarters now is in its third day, and 125 disabled and handicapped are pledging to continue the sin through tomorrow night, if not longer. In 1977, disability rights protesters hit federal office buildings in 11 cities at once. They were pushing the government to act on long neglected rules protecting the disabled in all facilities taking federal money. The San Francisco protests turned into a month-long sit-in with steady news coverage of people in wheelchairs taking care of each other and refusing to leave. The Occupation Army and Wheel Chairs shows no signs of calling that off. The sit-in worked, and these images of the grown-up disability demonstrator uninterested in pity kept accumulating.

1980, disabled people in Denver stage a protest demanding curb cuts. They've already blocked traffic until city transit officials promised to put in wheelchair lifts on all the buses. Now a couple guys in their own wheelchairs lean over for the photographers to whack down at concrete curbs. They're holding sledgehammers. 1988. Trustees at Gallaudet to National University for the Deaf try to appoint a president who, like every other so far, is not deaf. Angry students boycott classes and shut down the campus

until their candidate becomes the college's first deaf president. And in 1990, when the sweeping Americans with Disabilities Act gets hung up in the House of Representatives, disabled demonstrators in front of the Capitol building leave their wheelchairs and crawl up the marble steps to make sure that that bill gets through. Wherever you turned on the television, that was the image that you saw that millions of Americans saw. We're disabled people crawling up the stairs of the United States Capitol, not asking, not begging,

demanding, demanding to be a part of society, boldly going where everyone else had gone before. The ADA wasn't the first federal legislation designed to remove barriers for disabled people, but its reach was unprecedented. It mandated access and accommodation for the disabled in all places open to the public, businesses, lodgings, transportation,

employment. And it had qualifiers to be sure. The ADA required only what was quote unquote reasonable for employers and builders and so on. And there was a lot of argument about that word reasonable. But at the Bill's signing ceremony in 1990, President George H. W. Bush spoke with emotion about the recent fall of the Berlin Wall, which had divided communist East Germany from the West. Note the tool he mentions. And now I sign legislation, which takes a sledgehammer to another wall. One which has for too many generations separated Americans with disabilities from the freedom they could glimpse but not grass. And once again we rejoice as this barrier falls for claiming together we will not accept, we will not excuse, we will not

tolerate discrimination in America." Ed Roberts, the guy you see Berkeley officials once thought was too crippled for their university, finished his master's degree, taught on campus, and co-founded the Center for Independent Living, a disability service organization that became a model for hundreds of others around the world. He also married, fathered a son, divorced, won a MacArthur Genius Grant, and for nearly a decade ran the whole California State Department of Rehabilitation Services. He was 56, an international name and independence for the disabled, when a heart attack killed him.

I was stunned. Julia Sainn runs disability rights and resources in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's one of those programs based on the Center for Independent Living Model. And in 1995, Julia was at the annual March and meeting of the National Council for Independent Living in Washington, DCio was at the annual March and meeting of the National Council for Independent Living in Washington, D.C. Ed had died a few weeks earlier, and a special memorial for him was now on the schedule. We were going to be marching down the main streets to the Capitol. They were going to put Ed's wheelchair be at the front of the march.

The marchers followed the empty wheelchair, which was being dragged along by Ed's attendant until they reached the Senate office building. And then once inside, speakers got up to honor Ed's life and legacy. And Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa gave the eulogy. And he said, you know, when Martin Luther King Jr. passed, they built statues to him in honor of him. But Ed Roberts, Harkin, said, there was a better way to honor this warrior for another kind of civil rights. They're going to tear down barriers in his name. And every curb cut is a memorial to Ed Roberts.

memorial to Ed Roberts. And sometime later after the marchers had gone home or back to their hotels, Ed Roberts attendant pushed the wheelchair the rest of the way and left it on the front steps of this Smithsonian. The chair is beautiful to me. That's Catherine Ott, the curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. She's the one who found Ed's wheelchair in the storage room. His chair now remains on permanent display on the Smithsonian's website. It's all banged and dinged and the imprint of him. There's a big battery cage in the back. It's all customized.

He has a bumper sticker with a statue of liberty on it, with the big letters, yes, exclamation point. But having Ed's wheelchair at the Smithsonian does not mean everything is now okay, as anybody in the disability community will tell you. Every broken bus wheelchair lift, every temporarily out of function subway elevator, every Uber driver who won't take a wheelchair, every open manhole cover or car blocking the sidewalk. Most of the New York City subway system, which city leaders years ago decided was just too complicated to make fully accessible, the built environment is still littered with barriers.

Curb cuts are common now, but they're not at every intersection, even in Berkeley. And when it comes to attitudes and prejudice and assumptions about what people with disabilities can do and achieve and enjoy. We've not yet accomplished full inclusion. We have managed to make it easier by and large for people to get into the building. But have we done the work that's going to make it easier for them to get the education? For again, to not only have a job, but have a career, those things don't yet exist for many people. Even in Berkeley.

But here's what hits you when you go into Lawrence's office. It's in a building called the Ed Roberts Campus. But here's what hits you when you go into Lawrence's office. It's in a building called the Ed Roberts campus, and there are actually about a dozen other disability rights organizations in that building too. The place sprawls over an entire block in Berkeley. And every single thing about it is designed for everybody to use. Inside, like a great celebratory piece of art, is this huge, orange, spiraling ramp. It's two stories high. It's one of the ways to move between the first and second

floors and all around the ramp, the curved walls are lined with giant photos of demonstrations over the years. So if you're listening to this wall walking, and you happen to reach an intersection that's got a curb cut, maybe a bumpy one that lets blind people feel by cane where the sidewalk ends and the street begins. You might hold up for just a second. The most important thing I think people can realize is that by noting it, stopping, pausing, paying attention the next time you walk down the street, the next time you try to cross the street. Say a little thank you if you will.

Curb cuts haven't just been helpful for wheelchair riders, but also for people pushing strollers and shopping carts for elderly people who use walkers for bicyclists. And this phenomenon has come to be known as the curb cut effect. Roman Mars will be back to talk with reporter Cynthia Gourney about it right after this. So let's just start with the idea. What is the curb cut effect? The term gets used to describe a fix that is made to help a particular disadvantaged group of people. In this case, for example, putting ramps into sidewalk curbs so that people who roll because they have to can get across a street safely at an intersection.

But it's got much wider applications because it turns out that there are a lot of these fixes you do that end up having helpful ramifications for a huge group of people. The GI Bill, for example, after World War II, designed specifically to help veterans end up helping an enormous, wide-ranging population in the United States, the home building industry, you know, entire suburban communities, etc. And so who's the first person to apply the curb cut metaphor to this idea? Nobody knows who came up with the term the curb cut effect, at least let me rephrase that. I don't know who came up with the term somebody out there surely knows. I was not able to find out. The idea, however, has been around for quite some time.

out. The idea, however, has been around for quite some time. And the most interesting example of recent times that I learned about came from Steve Brown, the disability historian we heard from earlier. Steve told me that at one point recently while he was doing a radio program about his work and disability history, he got a phone call from his own parents who said, well, Steve, that was all very interesting. You were good on the show, but don't you remember that back in Kalamazoo Michigan where you grew up, by the way, we had some curb cuts and Steve said, what? And it turned out that in the 1940s in Kalamazoo, a disabled or injured veteran had gotten so fed up watching other disabled vets struggling up and down the curbs in Kalamazoo. Kalamazoo turns out, apparently at least at that time, to have extremely high, unusually high curbs because of river flooding. And this guy talked the city officials into just in a very few corners downtown cutting

ramps into the curbs. They did it. People started using it and they got so interested in what was happening that they decided to study it somewhat formally and see what effect it was having. And so Steve told me the officials commissioned a report. So it said that the curb ramps not only helped people and wheelchairs and people who use the crutches but women and did say women, pushing strollers and delivery men with their deliveries and bicyclists, and then it kind of ended with something like it was

creating freedom of movement for everybody. And it turns out there are lots of examples of this that were devised for people who had certain disadvantages, but really benefit all of us. Okay, you're in a really noisy bar. You're watching the basketball game. You're following it with the captions. You're experiencing the curb cut effect. You're trying to get into a building.

Your hands are full of packages. You use the special electronic button or the button that you can just hit with your hip. You've just used a thing that was made for somebody who can't push a door or in the earlier example, somebody who can't hear. We run into examples like this all the time without being aware of it. And in fact, when I started working on this story, whenever I would say to people, curb cuts, they would generally, especially if they were under the age of about 60 and had not been around Berkeley

when the stuff I'm talking about was happening, they would say, oh, you mean those things that are in the sidewalk so you can put your rollie bag or your stroller more easily so you can get those off the curb? Right. They thought it was meant for them. That's correct.

And not for people who are surveyed in the wheelchair. What was the strang them, and not for people in the survey. That's correct. What was the strangest, most unexpected curb cut effect that you found in your research? So the football huddle turns out to have been invented at Gallaudet University, the National University of the Deaf for students who couldn't hear. Because Gallaudet in the late 1800s, early 1900s, we had a football team and they had to figure out a way to communicate with each other so they got in a huddle and we're signing to each other and therefore we can't the huddle.

So it's weird to be that's a true. It's true. Look it up. So I looked it up. It is true. They were signing because they were playing other deaf teams and they got into a huddle because they didn't want the other deaf teams to be able to read their signs. So now of course every team in the NFL uses the football huddle.

That makes so much sense. I wouldn't have thought of that because across a field you could talk openly if you had hearing teams and they couldn't hear you. Exactly. You would never be fine. That's amazing. So this is connected to a bigger idea that I think a lot of designers and maybe a lot of other people now called universal design.

So how is this all connected? Well, the person who is generally cited as the father of universal design, although it's not clear that he actually invented that term. He's deceased now was an architect named Ron Mace out of North Carolina. He himself was a wheelchair user. And he did a lot of very influential writing. The general message being, look, we shouldn't be thinking about just people in wheelchairs or just people who can't see or hear when we design. We should be thinking about

designs that work for everybody, regardless of their mobility, their ability to see, their ability to hear, their age, and there's among architects who are advocates of universal design, there's a set of seven principles, which are too elaborate to enumerate here, but they're very straightforward. They're like things should be simple. They should be easy to use. They should be widely accessible. They should use the best available materials. And so the curb cut has turned out

to be a classic example of universal design because anybody who rolls uses it. Right. Mostly, I think that people think of universal design in the physical space with like nice script handles for people who maybe are arthritic and curb cuts and things. But the next frontier of universal design is in the virtual space, because the internet is the place

where all of us are living more and more of our lives, more of our time. How is universal design being applied to the virtual worlds? Yeah, aside from the football huddle start being started for the deaf, my second favorite phrase in all of this reporting was, Electronic Curb Cuts. Wow. Which is the term that people who work in information technology are now using

to talk about ways to make that technology accessible, available to people who can't see, can't hear, can't use a mouse in the old days, can't type on a keyboard. And Debbie Kaplan, the person who had originally been involved in the Center for Independent Living that we met earlier in the program, does this. This is her specialty now.

She works on accessibility of technology, information technology, i.e. electronic curb cuts. You know, those of us who fought for accessibility of the built environment when we realized that the electronic environment was getting built all around and becoming more and more a part of daily life, we realized that we needed to get involved quickly. And how did they get involved? I think that some of the earliest problems that they wanted to address were, how do you make computer information available to people who cannot see, who cannot

hear, who can't use a keyboard? So a lot of the work that they produced ends up being a factor in our daily lives. Siri and Alexa can recognize your voice because of technology that was originally designed for people who need to be able to address a computer in that way. There is a program that let the record show, I will never use, that allows your email to be read back to you while you're driving your car, right? That again comes from the kind of technology

that was developed by people working on electronic curb cuts. What was originally thought of as something just for people in wheelchairs ended up being just taken for granted by everybody and used in ways that weren't even originally anticipated for the benefit of many, many more people than originally thought of. That's true for the things that we do to make the electronic environment accessible also. Now that universal design and the curb-cut effect is a pretty widely held, uncontroversial opinion of how design should be done well, where are we in the state of design in the built world or the electronic world? Well, I would sort of sum that up in my own experience of learning about this by describing a little bit about my time with Debbie Kaplan.

At the time that we were meeting with each other, Debbie lived just outside Washington, DC. And spending an hour with Debbie Kaplan is like a crash course in the advances and ongoing challenges of disability fixes, at least in the United States. We are more advanced than most societies in this regard. Debbie is an attorney. She's actually an old friend. My husband and I have known her for many years.

She has a very interesting job working on electronic curb cuts and information design. She lives in a community that has been designed with universal design principles, accessible to everybody. She has a handy power wheelchair that gets her everywhere she needs to go. We were there in the winter. So you go down and then I successful elevator with Debbie and you go out in the street. And it's tough. There are curb cuts in Silver Spring but there's also snow on the sidewalk. There's people

who left their bicycles on the sidewalk now here where we are in the Bay Area. There's people leaving these new scooters all over the place. Every time I see a scooter now I think of people in wheelchairs, right? There was snow was snow, and I said, I turned to Debbie at one point and said, well, did they make an extra effort to come and clear the snow for people who are in wheelchairs who can't just dart around at the way somebody on foot can? And she looked at me and just burst out laughing and said, are you joking?

So we've come a very long way. And I think anybody who is presently or about to be grappling with disability will understand how long away we still have to go. Yeah, and it's not just about universal design principles in the making of things. We have to incorporate that in just our behavior and our sense of courtesy towards one another. Precisely. Yeah, precisely. Thank you so much. Thank you. 99% invisible was produced this week by Cynthia Gourney, edited and guest hosted by our executive producer Delaney Hall back in 2018. Mix Intek Production was by Serefusif, music by Sean Rihau.

Kurt Colstad is the digital director of the rest of the team, includes Christopher Johnson, Mosh Madon, Vivian Le, Joe Rosenberg, Katie Mingle, Emmett Fitzgerald, Chris Perubey, Sophia Klotzger, and me Roman Mars. We are now a part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family. Now headquartered six blocks north. In beautiful.

Uptown. Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 9-9-PI org or on Instagram and read it too. You can find other shows I love from Stitcher on our website, Nine-Night PI.org, including the Sportful from Dan Pashman. I've known Dan for years and years, and he was the first person to say hi to me on the

company Slack. So, you should listen to the Sportful. If you want to listen to any of the older Nine-Night PI episodes or read any of the articles, they're all still there. At Nine-Night PI dot org. of the older 99-Vi episodes or read any of the articles, they're all still there at 99-PI.org. The new company didn't get me one of those official audio logos yet, so. Bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada-bada- sex and um