I just got word that the Justice Department has moved to intervene in a disability discrimination lawsuit brought by private plaintiffs with visual disabilities alleging the City of Chicago fails to provide people who are blind, have low vision, or are deaf-blind with equal access to pedestrian signal information at intersections.

Sighted pedestrians can see flashing “Walk/Don’t Walk” signs and countdown timers to alert them when it is safe to cross the street. We can’t see them. Devices providing pedestrians with safe-crossing information through audible tones, speech messages, and vibrotactile surfaces do exist, but few intersections in Chicago offer them.

Chicago currently provides visual crossing signals for sighted pedestrians at nearly 2,700 intersections, but it has only installed Accessible Pedestrian Signals (APS) at a mere 15 city intersections. The proposed suit alleges that the lack of accessible pedestrian signals at over 99 percent of Chicago’s signalized intersections subjects people who are blind, have low vision, or are deaf-blind to added risks and burdens not faced by sighted pedestrians, including fear of injury or death.

I’ve come across accessible pedestrian signals in other cities we’ve visited — Madison, Wisconsin comes to mind, and Urbana, Illinois has a few — but those were inconsistent. At some intersections hearing “beep, beep, beep” meant I should cross, and at others it meant I should stay put. Looking for the button to press to activate the Accessible pedestrian signals got me off-track and made it hard to find the crosswalk again. Sometimes the beep, beep beep noise was so loud it made it difficult to hear and judge the traffic surge. I pitied the poor people who lived and worked near one of the APS and have to hear it all the time.

When I was newly blind and learning to use a white cane, orientation and mobility (O&M) instructors taught me to rely on the surge of traffic at my parallel to recognize when the signal is green and it’s safe to walk. That principle is reinforced every time I travel to Morristown, New Jersey to train with a new Seeing Eye dog. In fact, at the Seeing Eye, one isn’t eligible to be matched with a dog without having completed O&M training.

Dogs are color blind. Seeing Eye dogs can’t read the stoplights, so it’s not their job to determine when it’s safe to cross a busy street. They are trained to go right up to every curb at each street crossing they get to, stop right there, and trust their human partner to use their sense of hearing to figure out what direction traffic is moving. Once we’re certain that traffic is flowing the same direction we want to travel, we give our dogs the command to cross. Dogs are trained to keep an eye out and to disobey their partner if the team is in harm’s way. It’s called intelligent disobedience, and it’s a pretty difficult thing to ask the dogs to do, when you think about it.

Traffic in Chicago has changed immensely in the year Luna has been with me — things started out normal in February. Then came the COVID shutdowns in March. Cars were few and far between, making it difficult to rely on my sense of sound to judge traffic flow. “Is the light green?” With so few people out and about, there was no one to ask.

Traffic increased again when things opened up in the summer, then decreased again when a surge in COVID forced another shutdown in fall. I’ve made my share of bad decisions at intersections during these times, and I cringe to think that onlookers are blaming my young new Seeing eye dog Luna when it’s me who made the mistake.

So I’m no longer skeptical when it comes to accessible pedestrian signals. Do I need one at every corner? No. Be selective and put them at particularly difficult intersections — the T-intersection down the street at Dearborn & Polk comes to mind. I need all the help I can get at that one. You know what else would help? Mike tells me that most intersections display countdowns until the light next changes. Simply making those audible would be a great help. And as long as I’m getting greedy, can you please make sure I don’t have to locate a button to make the thing work?

Yesterday marked an anniversary: It was on April 4, 2020 that the City of Chicago officially released me from my voluntary COVID quarantine at a city-operated hotel. I was self-isolating after a weeklong stay at Northwestern. Doctors didn’t want me to go home until I was fever free for three days—the worry was that I might infect Beth, who, having been a type 1 diabetic for 55 years, was at greater risk for severe symptoms if she got COVID.

I got sprung a year ago.

I really wanted to just come home, but after I thought about it, the hotel was the right decision. And heck, I had a nice room (and I couldn’t leave) and three times a day I’d get a knock on my door and find a bag full of hotel bar food. (The Buffalo chicken sandwich is highly recommended.)

It was a more or less happy anniversary, though it had me flashing back to some scary times. I hope that this last week was, for me, personally, my final farewell to the whole damn episode. Last Wednesday Beth and I got our second vaccines.

And again, Beth was unfazed. And I got pretty sick for a day-and-a-half.

I felt a little funny and developed a headache during the cab ride home from the United Center vaccination site. Back in our apartment I got lightheaded and felt nauseated. “I feel funny,” I said to Beth. Recalling my passing out, falling and banging my head hard enough to have a little brain bleed a year ago, Beth simply said, “Go lie down!”

I did, and like last year when I fell ill, I got nasty chills. I fell into a deep sleep for several hours and woke up feeling washed out but otherwise fine.

I thought that was that until I woke up on Thursday morning with body aches and was dead tired. Back to bed and by Friday I was mostly fine except for the headache that persisted until Saturday.

It was if that spiky little bastard virus was taunting me: “Just a little more misery for old times sake?”

So, besides being Easter, yesterday was kind of a big deal. I outlasted the damn thing. Beth and I outlasted the damn thing.

And in those terrifying early days we leaned heavily on our friends and neighbors and family. Thank you. We are forever grateful.

Sadly, not everyone was as fortunate as I was.

That’s a picture, courtesy of my sister Marilee, of our Lincoln Park Village class meeting in 2016.

Happy anniversary! It’s been a year now that we’ve featured essays by writers in my memoir classes on the Safe & Sound blog every week. The writers in all my classes are on Spring Break now, so here I am with a short piece boasting about the strength they’ve exhibited since the shutdown in March 2020.

We all know this past year has been a real test of resilience, but if you’ve kept up with the weekly Saturdays with Seniors feature, I hope you’ve been buoyed by story after story from older adults armed with first-hand experience, knowledge and skills that have helped them cope with decades of challenges. To me it was no surprise to hear that studies are showing that older adults were less likely to experience pandemic-related anxiety, depression and stress then younger groups. From the Journal of the American Medical Association:

As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) began to spread in the US in early 2020, older adults experienced disproportionately greater adverse effects from the pandemic including more severe complications, higher mortality, concerns about disruptions to their daily routines and access to care, difficulty in adapting to technologies like telemedicine, and concerns that isolation would exacerbate existing mental health conditions, (but studies show that) older adults tend to have lower stress reactivity, and in general, better emotional regulation and well-being than younger adults.

An August 2020 survey published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed adults aged 65 and older were less likely to have anxiety, depression, and trauma or stress-related disorder (TSRD) than people in younger age groups. Results from some other studies:

• A study in Spain revealed that adults aged 60-80 had lower rates of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than adults age 40-59.
• A study in the Netherlands showed that, although loneliness increased during the pandemic, adults over age 65 didn’t see a big change in mental health.
• When 776 adults from the U.S. and Canada were asked to keep a diary about daily stressors, events, and the virus’ emotional impact, adults over age 60 more often reported positive events and emotions.

I started leading memoir-writing classes in 2005, which means I’ve had the privilege of hearing weekly stories of resilience for 16 years now. What have they taught me? That having people to lean on in difficult times can make a huge difference, and that, sometimes, the best we can do to stay strong is maintain and build those trusted relationships with others. So a big shout -out to all the writers who generously agreed to share their own 500-word personal stories with others every week on the Saturdays with Seniors feature here — enjoy your well-deserved Spring Breaks!

The photo above on the right is one of then-new Seeing Eye dog Luna’s first and last in-person school visits in early March, 2020–before you-know-what happened. And now…we’re back!

Well, sort of.

Black Lab Luna and I made four school visits this past month and will be doing more in April — all of them via Zoom. So now, rather than getting dressed up and packing a backpack with dog bowl, Braille book, white cane, talking clocks and other cool blind stuff and then heading outside where my fabulous friend Jamie Ceaser picks me up at the break of dawn to drive me an hour to the suburban schools we visit, I just brush my teeth and hair, put a nice sweater on, sit on the floor in my office, call Luna to sit at my side, have Mike arrange my laptop on a footstool to aim it so the kids see both Luna and me in our little Zoom square, and… abracadabra! We are live on screen in the bedrooms of third-graders learning from home during COVID.

These Zoom classes exist thanks to Patty O’Machel. A special needs advocate and the mother of a teenager who has cerebral palsy, Patty launched her business Educating Outside the Lines in 2018 to encourage other schools to use the disability awareness curriculum she developed years ago for her daughter’s elementary school.

Many Chicago suburban school districts added the program to their curriculum, and for a few years now I’ve participated in person as one of the people children meet who use “helping tools” to get things done. During disability week, children at participating schools get to experience prosthetic legs, wheelchairs, sign language, Braille, talking iPhones, Seeing Eye dogs and white canes hands-on.

But there’s the rub: after March of last year, “hands-on” was no longer allowed.

So Patty went to work, developed an online alternative, met with the schools to talk about how online visits could work, and we’re giving it a go. Our visits are only 30 minutes long, Patty introduces Luna and me to the kids, the teacher askes them to “mute themselves” while I give a short talk, then the kids either use chat to send their questions to Patty to read out loud, or they “unmute themselves” when they’re called on.

I far prefer them unmuting themselves to ask. Without being able to see their tiny faces on screen, I rely on the enthusiasm in their voices to assure me my words are connecting with these very bright eight- and nine-year-olds.

So many of you Safe & Sound blog readers have told me you’re sorry all my school visits were cancelled this past year, how much you’ve missed hearing questions kids ask. So here we go with a sampling from the Braeside Elementary third-graders Luna and I met virtually this past Monday morning:

• How do you get into a car?
• Do you remember what things looked like when you were a little kid and could still see?
• So after you get in the car, how do you drive, I mean, like, there are all those buttons so how can you tell those buttons and how can you know which one to push?
• So if a friend comes to pick you up, how do you know if they’re there and it’s the right car?
• Before COVID, did you feel people’s faces to see what they looked like?
• Did you have to learn a lot of new things after you were blind?
• I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how old were you went you got blind?
• How does your dog know what your destination is? (And yes, the kid really did use the word “destination.”)
• How long did it take you to learn Braille?
• Do you ever go anywhere by yourself, or is your dog always with you?
• When you used to use a white cane, did you prefer using one with a ball at the end of it? (And yes, the kid really did use the word “prefer.”)
• I know what you mean about that Braille thing, I read a book about Helen Keller and it had a chart of all the Braille letters and it looked like it would be very difficult (okay, not a question, but I appreciated his empathy and his use of the word “difficult” there).
• Do you ever make mistakes? Like, you said you have Milk in a carton in your refrigerator but you have juice in cans, Did you ever pour a glass of juice and it ended up being milk instead?
• How many years have you been blind?
• What if you use your phone to call someone and you don’t have the number right?
• How do you know the clothes you’re wearing?
• How does it make you feel when you make a mistake?

Make no mistake here: I was wrong to doubt whether Zoom could work for these school visits. Zoom is not the same as a real visit (the kids can’t line up after I take Luna’s harness off at the end to pet her) but I feel like the kids and I do connect in some ways. At the very least it gives those hard-working teachers doing this all from home a well- deserved 30-minute break!

Back when we could still do such things, we took Wisconsin Highway 26 on the last leg of our journeys to visit our son Gus in Watertown. A few years ago, the State of Wisconsin redid a stretch of that highway: Lanes were added and eventually, instead of a ramp and a traffic light, we took a ramp and a … roundabout … and after that, another roundabout instead of a second traffic light.

Carmel, Indiana is proud of its roundabouts, as it should be.

It was a bit jarring at first, but I’ve come to love the things. I’ve found I’m not alone, and for very good reason: roundabouts make tons of sense.

This I learned during a typical Sunday radio day, when Beth and I listen to On the Media and then Freakonomics Radio on WBEZ, our local NPR affiliate. I’m pretty sure I could just listen to both those programs once a week without any other news media and not be the worse for it.

Anyway, Freakonomics is hosted by Steven Dubner, the co-author of the enormously popular “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.” The other author was Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago.

The radio show takes measure and novel looks at about…everything, all through the lens of economics. Yesterday they focused on roundabouts!

The episode is titled “Should Traffic Lights Be Abolished?” and by the time it was over, my answer was pretty much, “Absolutely.”

For one thing, they’re safe. From a transcript of the episode:

As we noted earlier, about a quarter of all crash fatalities happen at intersections. So how do roundabout and non-roundabout intersections differ on fatalities? Looking at U.S. crash data from 2017 to 2019, you see that 0.1 percent of crashes at roundabouts result in a death. That could be the death of a driver, passenger, pedestrian, cyclist, anyone. 0.1-percent: that’s 1 death per 1,000 crashes at roundabouts. Okay, and how about your standard, four-way intersection, with traffic lights or stop signs? The death rate there is 0.4 percent, or 4 deaths per 1,000 crashes.

Jim Brainard, the Mayor of Carmel, Indiana, an Indianapolis suburb (and—who knew?—the epicenter of the U.S. roundabout movement) says it’s simple:

Roundabouts are smaller and because they’re smaller, everybody has to drive through them slowly. It’s about speed.

But there’s more. Because vehicles don’t sit and idle at stop signs or lights, roundabouts save energy and reduce carbon emissions.

From the transcript:

Studies by transportation scholars have found that converting a standard intersection to a roundabout does significantly cut fuel consumption and carbon emissions. Transportation scholars point to yet another advantage of roundabouts: smoother traffic. Now, that might seem counterintuitive — at least it did to me when I first looked at this research. You’d think that the slow speed required by a roundabout — which is good for safety — would be bad for traffic flow. But the data say otherwise. The data say that roundabouts reduce congestion.

That’s because traffic lights are programmed for maximum efficiency for a small window of time—morning rush plus evening rush. The rest of the time not so much.

In addition, traffic never just stops. It slows, but it flows. A friend of ours who spends a lot of time in Door County, a major tourist draw from Wisconsin and Chicagoland, told me the roundabout up there made an enormous difference. It used to be that traffic would back up a mile or more at a key stoplight intersection. Not so anymore.

The episode of Freakonomics is brilliant, especially if, like me, you have ever wondered about just how much a traffic signal costs, how much it weighs, and other geeky stuff. Give it a listen.

If not, well, drive safely.

P.S. Roundabouts and rotaries are not the same thing.