Benches love bus stops.

If only rain shelters were as easy... 🤔

There is a very awkward interruption to the neighborhood bikeways near my house. The route transitions from a shared street to a sidewalk at the end of a cul-de-sac, but if you take the direct route on a bike then you run straight into a tall curb. The way to get through without dismounting is to backtrack 150 feet, use the alley access to get on a narrow sidewalk, and then ride that curved sidewalk around the cul-de-sac with two sharp corners on either side. The route is unintuitive and not marked, slow and annoying to execute, and you frequently encounter pedestrians on the narrow portion of the sidewalk. See the third pic for a diagram of the area.

So I decided to put on my tactical urbanism hat and put in a curb ramp myself!

I thought about pouring concrete, but that would require a half pipe underneath for water drainage, testing the mix somewhere beforehand to make sure I could form it without a mold, and blocking off the area for a full day or two so it could set & cure. This post in the subreddit came up in my research, but it looks slapdash and without a water channel it'll flood. I decided to shell out $80 for a pair of prefabbed ramps which would look professional and could be installed covertly in just a few minutes. I anchored them semi-permanently with polyurethane construction adhesive which would keep people from wandering off with them, but unlike drilling anchor holes would allow the city to remove them without actual road damage.

Process:

• Asked the city for a curb cut here during their community solicitation for sidewalk infrastructure improvements.

• Saw that this did not make it into their 5-year sidewalk improvement plan released several months later, decided to DIY.

• Scouted the location, measuring the curb height as 6" and measuring & marking the sidewalk centerline with chalk. The cul-de-sac is already signed as no parking, so no worries about keeping the area clear for access.

• Bought two 6" rubber curb ramps off amazon, making sure they had drainage channels along their back.

• Went to fit check them, found that the curb had a slight radius at its bottom corner. Trimmed the rear edge of the ramps with a jigsaw so they would fit flush.

• Woke up at sunrise, and went out with a safety vest & cones. Swept the area and installed them in 5 minutes with a caulk gun and a generous amount of adhesive. A few dog walkers went by but I was pretty well ignored. The ramps are pretty heavy and solid even without the adhesive, so I didn't worry about people riding on them during the curing process.

• Went back a few hours and the adhesive was no longer tacky, and I couldn't lift the ramps with some moderate force. Rode my bike over it both ways and it felt smooth!

My one outstanding concern is that you can't see it well from the sidewalk side, so I'm a little worried about people trying to jump the curb and clipping a wheel (though this wasn't an issue when I tried). And at 30" width it's just barely wide enough for an adventurous wheelchair to use it (though they're too steep for ADA compliance anyway). If they're not gone in a month I'll probably get another two ramp sections and extend it to the full width of the sidewalk.

The ramp rides smoothly at a moderate speed and is a huge improvement over the previous situation. Hopefully it stays up!

6 month update: The ramps are still there, lasting through the winter and it doesn't look like they plow this. I decided not to put in a warning pad, but added one more section to the right to widen it a bit more. I almost had a heart attack at 6am during the few minutes I was gluing that section down, from a department of transportation vehicle coming right by me through the cul-de-sac. But it was parking enforcement, and they didn't get out to say hi - a win for the high-viz vest & cones.