ABU DHABI // One of Abu Dhabi’s newest residential towers is not easily accessible to wheelchair users or for parents pushing a pram, say residents.
Mossine Koulakzian was alerted to the problem at The Arc At Gate Towers when a guest who used a wheelchair recently visited him.
“We had to help him,” said Mr Koulakzian, an Armenian who lives in Tower C with his wife and five-month-old daughter. “We had to have, of course, two people hold him with the wheelchair over the steps.”
The Arc opened on Reem Island to residents in June. The complex has almost 1,000 units – studio, one bedroom and two-bedrooms – that has a central recreational area with pools, a playground, gardens and sports facilities.
But accessing these features from Tower C involves a series of “workarounds”, for anyone using a wheelchair or pushing a pram due to the building’s narrow doors and multiple steps at crucial entry and exit points, Mr Koulakzian said.
His wife, Yeva Avagyan, said she could not fit her pram – about 62cm wide – through the door leading from their building to the shared recreational area.
Even if she could fit the pram through the narrow door, she would still have to carry the pram and her baby over four steps, push the pram across a small platform and carry it down again to access the brick pathways leading to the playground and pool area.
Because of these barriers, Mrs Avagyan had to leave her building through the front entrance or car park and take another lift from neighbouring Tower 2 to access the recreation facilities. The door at Tower 2 is wider with no raised platform to climb.
“Every mum in this building who wants to take their child out to the poolside has to go either to the ground floor or to the parking to go into another building,” said Mr Koulakzian.
Stepping into one of the large public terraces on floors 11 and 20 was also impossible to anyone in a wheelchair and challenging to any parent pushing a pram.
“See, you have a 22 or 23cm step,” Mr Koulakzian said of the entry. “With the baby in the stroller, you can’t manage this. If you’re handicapped, this is not your area.”
The parking garages are without ramps and entering the building from these areas means climbing over one to four steps, depending on which floor you were parked on.
“There are wheelchair parking spaces everywhere, but no access to the building,” said Mr Koulakzian. In one car park spaces marked with a wheelchair logo had been painted over.
Mr Koulakzian said that he had raised the issue with representatives from Khidmah, which manages the Aldar-owned property, and they supplied him and his wife a small portable wooden ramp to use on the public terrace on the 20th floor.
“It’s not very heavy, but you have to do it every time and move it back again,” said Mr Koulakzian. “Khidmah said this was the maximum they could do.”
Another mother, D A, said she had experienced similar problems while pushing around her one-year-old son.
She said the pavement was more than half a metre high so “you have to walk on the road with your pram”.
She said that a glass walkway had been built connecting the tower to buildings across the road, but had never opened.
Special-needs advocate Professor Eman Gaad said the UAE had come a long way in improving accessibility to residents.
“If you look at the municipalities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, they have very strict rules about accessibility,” said Prof Gaad, a professor of special needs and inclusive education at the British University in Dubai.
“However, in practice, that is how people manipulate the rules.
“So, the rules are there. But sometimes a ramp, for example, that has to be a certain width or height, has to have longer materials and longer pavements – and obviously that will involve more costs.
“So, they don’t adhere by the book because of the costs and, at times, ignorance.”
Khidmah referred inquiries to Aldar, which did not reply to queries.
rpennington@thenational.ae
