Monitoring shows Volgograd’s infrastructure inaccessible for invalids

Staircases of apartment buildings, underground passages and a number of trade pavilions in Volgograd and the region are not fit for people with disabilities and baby carts, the public monitors assert. They are sure that the funds allocated for making the urban infrastructure better are spent inefficiently.

On September 29, Volgograd hosted two roundtables on the problems of urban environment’s accessibility for disabled people. The one organized by the "Nadezhda" (Hope) Volgograd Association of Blind Professionals discussed the monitoring outcomes of 11 facilities built in the last two years in Volgograd, Volzhsky and Mikhailovka. Activists had examined under- and overground pedestrian crossings, residential apartment buildings, kindergartens, sports complexes, hotels and trade pavilions, Evgeny Rybnikov, the Association's manager, told the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

Despite the fact that the requirements for accessibility of buildings for disabled people had appeared long ago, most of the new buildings in the Volgograd Region fail to meet them, Mr Rybnikov said at the roundtable. "Most of the facilities show some attempts to do something to make invalids’ access to facilities possible, but these measures are formal and unsystematic," he said.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.