Bike Rails and Blind Paths

I took this photo while in Seoul.  That's a stairway to cross over an el platform for the Metro.  Note the rail along the right side of the stairs to wheel a bike up.  Even inexpensive improvements to make bike/transit combinations more accessible are welcoming.

Those yellow inlays at the forefront of the photo are for the blind.  You see them all over Seoul and even on newer Beijing sidewalks, usually near the edge away from the road. 

Comments

[Shannon]

Sorry for being dense, but how do the yellow inlays help the blind?

[withrow]

Ah, well, it's obviously not the yellow that helps the completely blind, although even that might help someone with merely bad eyesight. It's the ridges in the inlay, which no one actually walks on because it's uncomfortable. Or no sighted person walks on, anyway, if s/he can help it. I'm not convinced this is such a great idea, btw.

[Westnorth]

Chicago has bike ramps in several locations, particularly for some of the stairs headed to lakefront path access tunnels.

I thought that the ubiquity of the tactile strips (you'll mostly see them at corners in the US) was interesting. There's a trend called "shared space" which abolishes the distinction between sidewalk and street on slow-space streets -- but disability advocates in the States say that you can't remove curbs without blind people stumbling all over the place. Japan seems to have a lot of "shared streets," and I wonder if their adoption of the tactile strips has something to do with that.

[Brady Dorman]

These tactile strips were common in Rome as well.