Tips and Tricks 

 

If your in a crunch to get a project completed for site plan approval try using the CADdetails iDrop  technology at CADdetails.com to quickly build a detail sheet by dragging and dropping site planning details and manufacturer's product details from the website right into an open session of AutoCAD. Once you have all the drawings you need then use the "explode" command to remove the borders and modify the layout.

In about 10 minutes you'll have the basics to get you through your submission and best of all it's a billable component of the design process!!

 

Coming up Next Month

 

By Stephanie Norton

By 2030, when the first baby boomers reach 84, the number of Americans over 65 will have grown by 75% to 69 million. That means more than 20% of the population will be over 65, compared with only 13% today. More than 35% will be over 50. While not everyone will be skiing a cornice like the eager skier pictured below, it is true that every possible standard for accessibility will change - our "normal" will evolve as demands change. Many "hipsters" will not retire completely but will demand more access to the leisure activities they enjoyed in their youth. They will create a tremendous boom for health related industries as they strive to overcome the natural effects of aging. They will have the money to purchase scooters or electric wheel chairs and the influence of their pocket books to make designers sit up and take notice!

Without even involving the aging hipsters, we know that we have already witnessed a tremendous growth of wheelchair and scooter use among the general population. Based on data collected in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a large-scale national survey which has been collecting health data continuously since 1957, we know that the population using wheelchairs has quadrupled from 409,000 in 1969 to 1.7 million persons in 1995.

Scooter use, though relatively low in prevalence, may also be increasing fast. According to the NHIS, the population using scooters was 64,000 in 1990 and 140,000 in 1994  (Russell, Hendershot, LeClere, Howie, and Adler, 1997). Users of wheeled mobility devices are slightly more likely to be elderly. In the NHIS-D, 933,000 are ages 65 and over out of 1.7 million, or 55.6 percent of all users Over a quarter of persons ages 85 and older, the "oldest-old," use canes, and about 15 percent use walkers. Only 7 percent use wheeled mobility devices (Kaye, Kang, and LaPlante, 2000).

Another factor to consider in our designs is that difficulty walking occurs much earlier in life than inability to walk, reaching a plateau of 27 percent by age 50, after which the fraction remains the same until around age 75, when the fraction of the population with difficulty begins to rise again. Thus, it is generally the inability to walk that is related to the increase in the use of wheeled mobility devices with age, not difficulty walking.

Landscape Structures is doing their part,

they know that accessibility has been a topic for playground designers for years. "At Landscape Structures, we have implemented products, designs and programs that align toward our accessibility mission.