Lunch Logistics

Last Monday started with an ambitious (for me) goal: roll from the house to the Bay Street mall, and get Shake Shack for lunch with the kids. I'm not the biggest fan of the Shack (especially when Sideshow Kitchen is right there) but the kids love the shakes and fries so off we went.

This was our route. And this is what I do before any long-range wheelchair adventure: plan it out in Strava. This lets me see roadway slopes to ensure they don't get beyond what I am capable of wheeling up. For this ride, the real hurdle is right at the end: the pedestrian bridge across the train yard to the mall.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In order to get to the bridge I have to battle all sorts of issues:

• Poorly-maintained sidewalks. Pulverized concrete, cracked and broken pavers, uplift from tree roots. All things that I used to easily step over now threaten to pitch me out of my chair.
• Road drainage slopes that exceed standard. California accessibility laws state that roads should not exceed 1/48 cross-slope. Meaning that the road can slope no more than one foot for every 48 feet of width. But in my neighborhood roads often exceed this, sometimes having up to a foot of camber across a 30' wide road. This is still doable, but it can change which street I use if I know there's a particularly difficult crossing.
• Sidewalk drainage slopes. Even sidewalks can exceed the 1/48 rule for cross-slope. And thanks to their short wheelbase, wheelchairs are incredibly sensitive to side slopes. Sometimes I find myself having to pull backwards on my "uphill" (away from the street) wheel even as I push forward with my downhill arm. This gets exhausting extremely quickly. Thankfully, on this ride, it's only half a block of this.
• Cars parked in the sidewalk. In my neighborhood, with houses built largely in the 1920s, it's not uncommon for one's car to exceed the length of one's driveway. And also in my neighborhood, it's also not uncommon for folks to assume people can just walk around their cars. But because the curbcuts for driveways are perilously steep for wheelchairs, I can't go around. This only happened once on the way to the mall, but it did require us to backtrack half a block and switch to the other side of the road.
• And ADA-compliant infrastructure that is nevertheless difficult, given my level of injury and recovery. The Emeryville pedestrian bridge complies with the ADA standard for long ramps with no landings. But this 1/20 slope was still difficult for me to climb, so I had to have Althea help push me.

So with a little help from the kids (and the guarantee of a ride back from Dacia), we got to have a nice little family lunch outing. The kind of thing we used to do all the time without thinking about it, but which now requires extensive pre-planning work and physical exertion.

But none of that mattered when we all sat down to lunch like nothing had changed. Althea was still stealing Arthur's fries. Arthur was still stealing Althea's milkshake. And I just got to sit and watch them be kids.