Local Woman Pushes For Improved Street, Sidewalk Conditions For Residents With Disabilities

A Fort Lee woman living with limited mobility is intensifying her efforts to bring about changes she hopes will enable her and others to get around town safer and a little more conveniently after a run in with police last month.

Barbara Lebow, who suffers from a combination of lymphedema and arthritis, conditions that make walking and standing extremely painful, relies on a mobility scooter to travel from point A to point B in Fort Lee. She said her main goal in advocating for better accessibility and full ADA compliance in her hometown isn’t just for people with mobility scooters, but also for those who use wheelchairs or walkers to get around or even people who push baby strollers.

“My goal is to make it easier for everybody,” Lebow said. “That’s my agenda. I would like to see corner-appropriate corner cutouts that aren’t going to put anyone in danger and get them off the sidewalk. My next goal would then be to get people into stores. There a number of stores you can’t get into. [The scooter] doesn’t jump. It won’t go up a flight of steps.”

The issue of ADA compliance recently came to a head for Lebow when she had what she called an “unfortunate encounter” with an “unprofessional” policeman while trying to get home—she lives on Bridge Plaza North—from “the non-accessible Fort Lee Post Office” on Main Street, taking what she thought was “the safest route.”

“I was on the road in the wrong direction; I was going towards traffic, not along with traffic,” Lebow admitted, adding that the incident occurred on Lemoine Ave. about halfway to Bridge Plaza North from Citibank. “I was driving towards traffic so they could see me. I didn’t know that I had to follow the bicycle rules.”

She said she was riding her scooter in the street, which is legal if you travel in the direction of traffic like bicyclists, because there’s no ramp to get off the sidewalk on the southwest corner of the intersection of Lemoine and Bridge Plaza North, and the southeast corner, which does have a ramp, isn’t much better. That ramp is cut at roughly a 45-degree angle, forcing the scooter to move faster, Lebow said, and she’s “petrified” to go down it with a constant stream of cars making right turns on red lights.

“That’s why I was riding in the street,” she said. “That’s why the police officer stopped me. The one corner, I couldn’t get off once I got on, and the other one … I’m scared to death of it.”

Lebow told Patch she was not ticketed for the violation, but rather let off with a warning. She also said that as a result of the incident she is now better informed of the rules of the road regarding scooters and has “met several Fort Lee policemen who have been wonderful.”

“[The police] spent a tremendous amount of time researching the laws,” Lebow said. “As a result, I now wear a helmet. This is not a fashion statement. … It was a misunderstanding; I’ll accept that. But as far as I’m concerned, it was a bad situation.”

At the July 21 regular meeting of the Fort Lee Mayor and Council, Lebow expressed her concerns and related the incident to the borough’s governing body.

“In New Jersey, by law, handicapped people are allowed to use mobility scooters,” she told Fort Lee Mayor Mark Sokolich and members of the Council. “Why anyone would want to use one is beyond me. … Their access is cut off to most stores, many buildings and other destinations.”

She added that her knees and legs absorb the shock of every bump in the road, and that potholes pose another serious risk.

“I have been approaching [Sokolich] for four years,” Lebow later told Patch. “For four years he has been committing to me that he would take a ride with me because I wanted him to walk in my moccasins. When you’re using a mobility scooter, the world is a whole different place.”

But while Sokolich didn’t take a ride with Lebow personally, he did assign Michael Maresca of the Fort Lee Department of Public Works to the task, he said, “to identify what the problem areas are.”

Lebow said she was appreciative of the opportunity to point out some of those problem areas, and added that Fort Lee has “for the most part” done a good job with recent work on Anderson and Center Avenues when it comes to ADA compliance. But she also said there are still plenty of “trouble spots” in town.

“Mike was terrific,” Lebow said of the roughly 90-minute, ride-along survey. “It was probably far better than anything I could have had because he knows the streets, and now it was just tweaking his look.”

Among those “trouble spots” in Fort Lee Lebow identified for Patch—she’s been known to ride around town with a tape measure at the ready—are the following:

• Linwood Ave. and Bridge Plaza South – “NE and NW corners have traffic light bases in corner cut-outs—impassable.”
• Center Ave. and Bridge Plaza South – “NW and SW corners in bad condition with potholes. Divider [is in] very bad condition. NW corner [has] very steep ramp up.”
• Center Ave. and Whitman St. – “No corner cut into circular driveway”
• Sidewalk on Lemoine Ave. - “In front of mall where Starbucks/Boston Chicken are is only 22 inches wide with bush overgrowth and fire hydrant placement.”
• Staples on West St. – “There is a cutout onto the sidewalk, which is blocked by a fire hydrant. Once you get past the fire hydrant, you realize there is no curb cutout to get off sidewalk.”
• Bridge Plaza North, west of Linwood Ave. – “Cutout is not in crosswalk and is way too deep, catching the back wheels of the scooter going down and is too steep going up. It sits about 2 inches above the roadway.”
• Main St. – “Almost all driveways and ramps are 2 inches above asphalt because of decorative brick.”
• Bridge Plaza South and Martha Washington Way – “No corner cutouts; just broken curb and bad potholes.”

Complicating the matter is the fact that the worst of the “trouble spots” are right where Lebow lives, and the very stretch of Lemoine Ave. she has to traverse to get from her home to Main St. is Port Authority jurisdiction.

“I’d say that some of [the problems areas] have been identified,” Sokolich said. “The major bone of her contention is that some of the curbs don’t have an appropriate ramp to allow her to get onto that sidewalk. Unfortunately, some of those sidewalks are far from being in our control.”

But the mayor said jurisdiction  “generally hasn’t stopped me in the past.”

“I never use it as an excuse,” Sokolich said. “If a road needs to be paved, and it’s a state road, and it’s in abominable condition, I do it and deal with the consequences later. But on this, it’s going to be very, very difficult to do it because it’s a very, very high curb. I’m not saying no. We’ve written letters to the Port Authority, and we’re waiting to hear from them on what their position is. But those curbs are all metal-structured, reinforced. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars to do what it is that they want accomplished, and those are funds that are not available to us at the moment.”

Lebow said she’s personally tried to get someone from the Port Authority to listen.

“But I’m just one squeaky wheel,” she said.

She also said she’s been working with the Bergen County chapter of Heightened Independence and Progress (HIP CIL), an advocacy group for people with disabilities and independent living.

Nancy Hodgins of HIP CIL said she has also contacted the Port Authority on Lebow’s behalf, but that she hasn’t had much more luck getting a response. She did say however that she’s hopeful she’ll get some answers when the person she’s waiting to hear back from returns from vacation.

But Hodgins also said ADA compliance problems in general are not unique to Fort Lee.

“The law is very clear,” Hodgins said, adding that there are “varying levels of compliance” among municipalities.

“Some towns are very good at [being in compliance], and others are not,” she said.

Hodgins called Lebow a “strong advocate,” who is doing the right thing by speaking out, and said people like Lebow have as much of a right to get around safely as pedestrians.

Lebow, who works full-time from home as the director of sales and marketing for a firm that sells restaurant equipment and supplies and also volunteers in community—she’s a member of the local R.A.C.E.S. team, for example—doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her. She just wants to call attention to an issue that a lot of people may not think much about.

“I do have a life,” Lebow said. “Most often people see me, and they make a really bad assumption that I’m sitting home eating bon bons all day. I work from home, but that’s a whole other issue. Even though I may have mobility issues I do whatever I can to give back to Fort Lee”

Sokolich says that in addition to writing letters to the Port Authority to deal with what Lebow refers to as “the offending corner” at Lemoine Ave. and Bridge Plaza North, the borough is doing what it can to help.

“Those roads that are in our control, as soon as I have the special projects team concluding a couple other things, I do plan on getting them out there to take care of a couple of those problem areas in the hopes that we can accommodate her,” Sokolich said.

Lebow, who has been using a mobility scooter for about 10 years, said she’s going to work with HIP CIL on a survey project in Hackensack she hopes to be able to bring to Fort Lee.

“This is not where I plan on stopping this quest,” she said. “Until the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey becomes ADA-compliant, I will continue to advocate.”