Elevator in building to all floors. Draft regulations spark controversy

• The draft regulation of the Minister of Development and Technology on the technical requirements for buildings and their location is receiving comments as part of a public consultation. Many of these comments address the needs of people with disabilities.
• The lack of accessibility for disabled people to all floors of the building is controversial. Opinions on this matter are divided.
• The Avalon Foundation considers these regulations to be excluding and preventing the independence of people with disabilities, and the Łódź District Chamber of Architects of the Republic of Poland considers the idea of ​​obliging disabled people to ensure access to all floors of the building to be pointless and unrealistic.
• The Integration Foundation believes it is necessary to define parameters to ensure that the elevator can accommodate, among other things, a wheelchair for disabled people.

A draft regulation of the Minister of Development and Technology regarding the technical requirements for buildings and their location was published on the Government Legislation Centre website in June. On Friday, August 22, comments submitted during the public consultation were published.

One of the comments was submitted by the Avalon Foundation, which referred, among other things, to the obligation arising from the project to provide an elevator in public buildings, collective housing buildings and multi-family residential buildings.

According to this provision, in new buildings, disabled people must be provided with access from the ground level to all usable floors, with the exception of technical rooms or rooms that are part of two-level residential premises.

This idea was met with strong opposition from the Avalon Foundation, which is surprised that people with disabilities would not have access to technical rooms such as a storage room, boiler room, laundry room, or drying room in a collective housing building.

This is excluding and preventing the independence of people with disabilities.

- emphasizes the Avalon Foundation, expecting the removal of the provision that discriminates against people with disabilities.

The Avalon Foundation also considers the provision providing disabled people with "at least one access point to the building entrance that they can use" to be discriminatory. The Foundation is concerned that this means that people with special needs, including those with disabilities, will have separate areas in buildings.

A discriminatory provision that creates space for creating zones for different groups

- he points out.

The ArchiPrawo Foundation also highlights the need to remove the phrase "to the part of the building that these people can use," and proposes changing it to say that this applies to rooms intended for permanent human occupancy. The ArchiPrawo Foundation also points out that the phrase "to the part of the building that these people can use" has led to design abuses that limit access for people with disabilities for many years .

In turn, the Łódź District Chamber of Architects of the Republic of Poland considers the idea of ​​obliging disabled people to ensure access to all floors of a multi-family residential building to be pointless and unrealistic, even if these are floors without apartments for these people.

The Integration Foundation, however, notes that very often, installed lifting devices do not meet the appropriate parameters for wheelchair users. The most common errors include a platform that is too small and a load capacity that is too low. Therefore, the Integration Foundation proposed supplementing the regulation with minimum parameter requirements for this type of device: a width of at least 0.8 m, a length of at least 1.2 m, and a load capacity of no less than 250 kg.

In turn, the Playground Control Center pointed out that the obligation in paragraph 33 of the regulation to fence all playgrounds is too far-reaching and unnecessary, since there is no need to fence a playground on a beach or in a forest, or even in the interior of a housing estate where dogs are not walked off-leash and caregivers clean up excrement . Instead, the company proposed that a playground be subject to the fencing requirement if its boundary is less than 20 meters from, among other things, a road, street, parking space, or pedestrian/vehicle path.

The Integration Foundation, however, pointed out inconsistencies in the project, as with regard to playgrounds outside schools or kindergartens, it only mentions ensuring the availability of 30% of toys for people with special needs, but not the playground itself.

This means that you can design a playground that is inaccessible to, for example, a person in a wheelchair, but at the same time it will have to have facilities for that person.

- notes, calling for the addition of a provision that the playground should be accessible to people with special needs.

The Łódź District Chamber of Architects of the Republic of Poland, however, drew attention to the regulation requiring only one room in a multi-room apartment to be illuminated. In the Chamber's opinion, this represents a regression (pathological development).

In the opinion of the Centre for Universal Design of the Gdańsk University of Technology, it is also important to specify the details regarding the need to ensure access for people with special needs to places of temporary storage and selective waste collection.

Accessibility should be described in terms of access width, width, and color contrast of the gate, lock, and handles. The need for a unified standard for the location of selective waste collection containers should be emphasized, so that visually impaired people know or can locate appropriate waste containers. This is particularly important in collective housing facilities (e.g., boarding houses and student dormitories) and multi-family housing, where fines are imposed for noncompliance with waste segregation regulations. Accessibility should address the needs of wheelchair users, people with short stature, including children, and people with blindness and visual impairments.

- says the Center for Universal Design of the Gdańsk University of Technology.