I am not a student any longer and have been in professional practice for over 4 years now in environmental planning and design, my fault for not updating my profile. However, I am still little bit offended by the tone of your message, the thanks at the beginning and end don’t make up for the tone of the rest of the article. The notion that I am defending this project is incorrect as well, there are ADA issues here, however your reporting on the story offered no context to the project, even including what you responded to me with would have been helpful in your discussion.
THe ICPI Design, Specifications, Construction, and Maintenance guide discusses this issue:
“An unacceptable opening is one that can receive insertion of a 1/2 in. (13 mm) steel sphere, PICP openings filled with small aggregate (typically to the bottom of the paver chamfers) comply with this design guideline.”
These are the things I do pay attention to and I don’t see how you could make the correlation that I don’t by anything that I wrote. The real issue here is should that be an accepted ADA practice to allow for the gravel to count towards compliance. There is no question that these pavers do not have enough gravel to be compliant, but the real criticism should be of ADA and not recognizing this as a potential for improperly or under maintained pavers. I too agree with your assertions about the inability to rely on maintenance, those points are quite valid.
Thanks.
Alan Ray, you are right, they don’t look very good at all. I would go for a Hydro-flow brick, no gaps at all!
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