Newton Disability Commission member details accessibility gaps in three pedestrian corridors

Barbara Lischinsky walked the same Newton streets almost every day from 2017 to 2025, guide dog at her side, hitting the same broken curb cuts and vanishing crosswalks year after year. Now the longtime Commission on Disability member is naming names — and calling out three specific corridors she says are effectively off-limits to residents with disabilities.

"These are not recreational walking routes," Lischinsky wrote in a July 9 Newton Beacon essay. "They are the routes to schools, public transportation, medical care, shopping and community life."

Lischinsky, a Newtonville resident who is blind, profoundly hard of hearing and mobility-impaired, has served on the commission for more than 22 years.

The Beacon Street–Waban corridor, a major school route running to Angier School, has uneven sidewalks, spotty curb cuts and mid-block crossings Lischinsky says a blind pedestrian can't reliably find alone.

Near the Lower Falls/I-95 interchange, the pedestrian path between Washington Street and Lower Falls simply doesn't connect — cutting residents with disabilities off from the Woodland MBTA Green Line station. Lischinsky says it's still unclear whether the city or the state is responsible for fixing it.

And on Washington Street toward West Newton, new bike lanes have gone in — but sidewalks haven't gotten the same upgrade, leaving West Newton Village hard or impossible to reach safely on foot.

Lischinsky's point: residents near Woodland Station and Newton-Wellesley Hospital are effectively cut off from both Lower Falls and West Newton by these same infrastructure failures — not by choice, but by broken sidewalks and missing crossings.

Newton's Washington Street Pilot Project includes safety and accessibility upgrades starting from Chestnut Street in West Newton, and an MBTA project already in design would add elevator and stair connections at the I-95 interchange — addressing part of the Lower Falls gap. Newton's 2023 override also included $1.4 million for streets and sidewalks. But as of July 10, neither the city nor MassDOT has publicly responded to the specific gaps Lischinsky named, and no city council vote, commission meeting or state project deadline has been announced to address them.