NYC to Provide Traffic Signals that Provide Sounds and Vibrations for the Visually and Hearing-Impaired to Cross Safely

By Yehudit Garmaise

A federal judge yesterday ordered city officials, in response to a lawsuit brought by two visually-impaired New Yorkers and the American Council of the Blind, to install more than 9,000 signal devices that emit sounds and vibrations to inform visually and hearing-impaired pedestrians when they can safely cross intersections.

In what is a significant advancement for the rights of the blind and deaf in a major city, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer criticized city officials, in an opinion released Monday morning, for failing to make most of New York’s more than 13,000 intersections safe for the city’s thousands of visually-impaired residents, who cannot rely on the city’s visible cues, such as flashing countdowns, red hands, and white walking figures that communicate when pedestrians who can see can cross the city’s intersections.

Although as many as 400,000 New Yorkers are blind, 1 million are visually-impaired and 208,000 of the city’s residents cannot hear, Accessible Pedestrian Signals (A.P.S.) are installed at fewer than 4% of the city’s intersections.

“On a daily basis I have to deal with trying not to get hit by cars because there is no A.P.S. telling me when it is safe to cross,” Christina Curry, said a plaintiff, who cannot see or hear, in the lawsuit. “Installing so many A.P.S. over the next 10 years means that I and tens of thousands of New Yorkers will have access to street crossing information and be able to travel safely, freely and independently throughout the city.”

“There has never been a case like this. We can finally look forward to a day, not long from now, when all pedestrians will have safe access to city streets,” said Torie Atkinson, a lawyer for the American Council of the Blind and the two visually-impaired New Yorkers, who filed the suit. “We hope this decision is a wake-up call not just to New York City, but for every other transit agency in the country that’s been ignoring the needs of people with vision disabilities.” 

The plaintiffs of the case, who filed their lawsuit in 2018, accused the city’s Department of Transportation and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration of making roadways unnecessarily dangerous for those who cannot see, and thereby violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The failure to install the technology more widely, the judge wrote, impedes the independence of people who need them, by making it difficult to cross streets safely and quickly.

“The ability to have access to an accessible pedestrian signal is even more important now than it was two years ago [before the pandemic],” said Lori Scharff, the former president of the American Council of the Blind in New York. “In my lifetime, the generation after me, everybody’s going to have access.”