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Still mourning the loss of beloved friend Fred Lupke, Berkeley wheelchair advocates have started gearing up for a fight to make Berkeley streets and sidewalks safer. 

“Disabled people here in Berkeley need to use this as a lead to get together to do something,” said Blane Beckwith, local chair of national disabled rights organization ADAPT. 

Councilwoman Dona Spring struck the first blow this week, authoring a measure to authorize emergency funds to repair and widen sidewalks along blocks of Ashby Avenue between Martin Luther King Way and Ellis Street—the same stretch where a car struck Lupke’s wheelchair from behind. 

The measure—set to go before Council Oct. 14— would permit wheelchairs to use now off-limits bike lanes and direct the city staff to identify other pedestrian safety improvements along Ashby. 

“If there had been a passable sidewalk on that side of Ashby, Fred might be alive today,” Spring said, adding that the two blocks she wants repaired are heavily traveled by disabled residents on their way from the Ashby Bart Station to the South Berkeley Senior Center on Ellis Street. 

Spring estimates the repairs will cost approximately $100,000. She hopes the city can find the money in its budget, but she said the situation is so dire that, if necessary, the city should dip into its $6 million reserve fund to pay for the repairs. 

“Right now Ashby is a death trap for people in wheelchairs,” she said. The boulevard is designated as a state highway, meaning that the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is responsible for maintaining the road. Any call to widen the sidewalk along Ashby at the expense of the street would need state approval. 

Spring’s measure calls on the city to explore civil and legal actions to compel Caltrans to improve pedestrian safety on the street, but a movement led by residents to wrest control of Ashby from Caltrans could put the city in the driver’s seat. 

Berkeley Transportation Director Peter Hillier said he would like to follow through on long standing calls from residents to pursue city ownership of the street within the next two years. He said that while Caltrans was concerned primarily with upgrading traffic signals so that they could detect bicycles, they “did not seem to have interest in community concerns [like safety].” 

Hillier said the city recently accepted state grants that will pay for a lighted crosswalk at Ashby and Piedmont Street, with three more possible at the intersections of Ashby and Regent, Benvenue and California streets. 

In addition to Spring’s Council proposal, Berkeley’s Commission on Disabilities is planning to revive previous safety suggestions in hopes that city hall might be more receptive. 

Among a host of recommendations, the commission is seeking city help to crack down on cyclists crowding out wheelchair riders on sidewalks, chart traffic accidents involving wheelchairs, and aggressively enforce rules to keep sidewalks clear of overgrown vegetation, parked cars and garbage bins. 

“Fred had asked for some of these things for years,” said Disability Commission Chair Emily Wilcox, who wanted the city’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Waterfront to proactively inspect sidewalks for overgrown vegetation. Department head Lisa Caronna said budget cuts had recently forced her to slash a gardener and forester position, and that no money was available to pay for random inspections. 

Currently residents may complain about overgrown vegetation, and the city will give the property owner a 15-day notice to clear the sidewalk. 

While disabled advocates agreed the time was ripe to push the city for safety and accessibility improvements, the community remains unorganized. Most said they wanted to fight for safer roads but that no grassroots effort had begun. 

“We don’t have a clubhouse,” said Wilcox, noting that accessibility concerns made it difficult for locals to assemble even for commission meetings. She and other disabled residents said they hoped that high attendance at a planned memorial service for Lupke could lay the seeds for a unified movement. 

“This has just begun to stir. It isn’t over by a long shot,” said Michael Pachovas. In 1999, Pachovas was one of dozens of disabled activists who shut down Ashby Avenue for a day to demand safety improvements after Sharon Spencer was killed in her wheelchair as she tried to cross Ashby Avenue at Piedmont Street. 

The protest secured several concessions from the city, Pachovas said, but promised pedestrian right-of-way signs and other improvements never materialized. 

Pachovas and others interviewed hoped the Commission on Disabilities would take the lead in formulating proposals and lobbying the city. The commission will hold a transportation subcommittee meeting Friday to vet ideas and then use a Wednesday meeting to finalize an agenda to present to Council and city officials. 

Disabled advocates complained they didn’t get a fair shake with Council and city officials and said that Spring, who uses a wheelchair, is sometimes at odds with activists on key issues. 

“People think that because there is a woman with a disability on city council that she speaks for us, but that is not true,” said Pachovas, who noted that Spring has sided with bicycle advocates favoring speed bumps on residential streets, while many wheelchair riders insist the bumps cause pain. 

Spring, however, has full support from wheelchair riders in her drive to legalize wheelchair riding on residential streets. State law classifies wheelchair riders as pedestrians and relegates them to sidewalks—where they are at the mercy of painful bumps and divots that rattle their chairs.  

The law was reasonable decades ago, Spring said, when most wheelchairs were hand powered, but unrealistic now that motorized chairs travel up to 11 mph. California law states that wheelchair riders are allowed in bicycle lanes only if there is no sidewalk. The city attorney’s office would not comment if Berkeley had the authority to supersede state law. 

“For me to get to BART takes fifteen minutes on the street,” she said. “If I were to take the sidewalk it would take 40-45 minutes and I would be in so much more pain.” 

Wheelchair riders already use side streets, but say changing the law would give police greater leverage to punish drivers who hit them. The woman who hit Lupke from behind said she was blinded by the setting sun. She was not charged or ticketed, police said, because under the existing laws, Lupke was at fault for riding down Ashby Avenue. 

“Right now, if someone in a wheelchair gets hit, the police perception is that we were doing something wrong,” Pachovas said. “It’s galling that someone can say the sun was in my eyes, kill someone and not even get a traffic ticket.” 

Pachovas predicted a protest on Ashby similar to that one that followed Spencer’s death. But as far as a cohesive agenda, he said, disabled advocates needed more time. “This shouldn’t be a knee-jerk reaction,” he said. “We need to figure out what we want to do.”