It’s Time We Treat Accessibility as an Economic Investment
A new infrastructure analysis estimates that American cities are carrying more than $1 trillion in hidden infrastructure deterioration and deferred maintenance liabilities. Roads, bridges, water systems and public facilities continue to age while local governments struggle to fund long-term repairs. Much of that deterioration remains politically and financially invisible until failure becomes unavoidable.
One category of infrastructure failure is still largely absent from that conversation: accessibility. And it should be viewed not as a liability but as a productive investment that could help cities as they face increased maintenance costs.
Accessibility rarely fails in dramatic ways. It fails in accumulation — in small obstacles that compound until independence disappears. A utility pole blocking the path, a degraded curb ramp, standing water at an intersection, a car blocking the sidewalk — these small maintenance issues, often coordinated by different city departments, determine whether a city is navigable by people with disabilities.
We often treat these fixes as isolated compliance issues. Accessibility is better understood through routes and connectivity. For example, a building may have a compliant, accessible restroom, but if the ramp to enter the building is too steep and the front door requires too much pressure to push open, then the restroom inside the building isn’t truly accessible.
A city functions only when people can move through it reliably — to work, school, healthcare and civic life. That’s where network effects matter.
As networks expand, their value doesn’t grow in a straight line. Each barrier removed doesn’t help just one person; it multiplies the number of jobs, services and institutions that become realistically reachable for everyone.
And that economic value shows up in measurable ways.
First, labor supply. A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examining work-from-home during the COVID pandemic found that a 1-percentage-point increase in remote work was associated with a 1-percent increase in full-time employment among people with physical disabilities. When barriers to participation fall, labor-force participation rises.
Second, reduced transaction costs and greater reliability. Accessibility investments don’t simply fix a curb ramp. They reduce friction across the local economy. They expand the part of the city that is reachable within a reasonable time and cost. People can accept jobs farther from home. Businesses draw from a wider labor pool and customer base.
Third, avoided downstream costs. Falls and injuries are expensive. Safer pedestrian networks reduce injury-related expenditures and preserve workforce participation. Those are not abstract benefits; they show up in municipal budgets and insurance costs.
Yet cities rarely evaluate accessibility spending this way.
An Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development working paper has made a related point: governments are good at pricing the construction line item of infrastructure, but routinely undercount the broader economic upside of participation. When those gains aren’t measured, accessibility appears expensive even when it is economically productive.
If the benefits are real — economically, legally and morally — why do cities struggle to deliver consistent improvements?
Part of the answer lies in what political scientist Michael Lipsky called “street-level bureaucracy.” Public policy is carried out by frontline employees operating under constraints. Even strong civil-rights mandates stall without systems that ensure durable implementation across budget cycles and leadership changes.
The data reflect that challenge. A 2020 national study of 401 local governments found that only 13 percent had a publicly available Americans with Disabilities Act transition plan, despite being legally required as the foundation for compliance. Fewer than 2 percent had plans that met core legal criteria. Where plans existed, they often identified curb ramps and sidewalks as primary problems but stopped short of detailed implementation strategies.
Yet separate research using on-the-ground pedestrian infrastructure data found that cities with formal transition plans tended to have higher accessibility scores than those without. Planning alone doesn’t remove barriers, but planning correlates with better outcomes.
That distinction matters.
Accessibility improvements fail when they are treated purely as compliance costs and assigned to already overextended departments without structure. They gain traction when they are treated as capital allocation decisions — investments in network performance that expand participation, reduce transaction costs, and lower long-run fiscal risk.
The question isn’t whether a curb ramp costs money. Of course it does. The question is whether the city values the additional economic and civic connections that the ramp enables.
When accessibility is treated solely as compliance, it competes with every other budget line item and often loses. When it is treated as infrastructure — as an investment in labor supply and network performance — the calculus changes.
Accessibility is not charity. It is capital allocation. And cities that understand that will deliver better outcomes for everyone.