Are they just not practical? They seems cheaper to build instead of elevators for wheelchair bound people.
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Okay, grandma dinners ready! *all you hear is the rolling of rubber and a big ass SLAM as grandma crashes into the wall* grandma does not have that arm strength for that, my mother tried a ramp for her porch, it had small lips for people to walk up it, my dad slipped and fell down the whole entire 10ft ramp. Ramps are very dangerous unless they’re VERY slow inclines. That’s why wheelchair access is normally a slow ramp up that doesn’t feel like your doing much more than walking, so the space needed for an entire floor of slow incline would be insane.
You can’t make the ramp too steep or it’ll be impossible for a wheelchair user to push themselves up and safely go down the ramp. The longer the distance of the ramp, the less steep it has to be or the user might be too fatigued to safely make it up or down. Look at any ramp going into a building that just has a few steps. Now imagine how long that ramp would have to be to get to the 2nd floor of a building and how much space it would take to build such a ramp.
Edit: The ADA recommends an incline ratio for wheelchair ramps of 1:12, meaning for every inch of height you need 12 inches in length. So if we assume one floor up being 100 inches, your ramp would have to be 100 x 12 is 1200 inches or 100 feet or 30.5 meters in length.
It would be really slippery and dangerous without shoes on, and way too steep to use with a wheelchair. If the staircase goes up 10 feet in height, they would need to cover a horizontal distance of like 30 feet or more or they’d be way too steep to roll a wheelchair up without enormous effort. So basically just not enough space and much more danger of falling.
For the slope to be gentle enough that you could climb it comfortably without rolling backwards or falling if it is slippery, it would have to occupy a large area. A maximum steepness ramp has a slope ratio of 1:12. To climb 3 meters you’d have to allocate 36 meters or 18 meters in a U shape of length. Public buildings could have a higher ceiling than 2.5 meters. Perhaps a shopping mall or a train station could have enough room for that, but not a house.
Speaking from the US, our standards for accessibility (collectively called ADA guidelines) suggest a wheelchair accessible ramp for commercial businesses having a slope of 1:12. That is, for every 12 units of horizontal distance, the slope is allowed to rise by 1 unit.
A typical house story is going to be something in the ballpark of 10 feet, or around 3 meters. To install a ramp at the recommended commercial slope of 1:12, that would mean your ramp would have to be *120 feet* long, or *30 meters* long. That’s *way* longer than most houses are!
I should say that the ADA does allow wheelchair slopes to go up to a 3:12 slope for private residential use, which would condense that distance to about a third, but those slopes can be difficult for wheelchairs and motorized scooters to climb. 2:12 is a better compromise, but only reduces the slope distance by half. We’d still be talking about a 60′ / 15 meter ramp here. You’re still not going to fit that comfortably inside a house.
Contrast that with the typical rise/run of a common staircase, which will tend to be somewhere in the ballpark of 7:11 (7 units up for every 11 units long). That’s a lot closer to a 45 degree angle, meaning the staircase only needs to take up slightly more horizontal room than what it has to climb. Significantly more compact.
Elevators, though expensive as hell to install and keep maintained, simply take up a smaller footprint.
Stairs can be a lot steeper and still be usable, To go up 10 feet, stairs would have a footprint of about 40 square feet, while a ramp would have a footprint of about 400 square feet, but it’s even worse when you consider that much of it will require floor space on both the upper and lower level. In many cases that would be more than half the usable area of the house just dedicated to the ramp. Might as well pretend the second floor doesn’t exist.
Much more practical to have stairs and a wheelchair lift.
The space you need to span a ramp that is suitable for wheelchair access is actually pretty substantial. Here in the UK, building regulations cover the minimum requirements needed for new buildings and these are mostly non-negotiable and relate to the actual function and performance of the building rather than the aesthetics — things like fire resistance, structural standards, access provisions etc.
Ramped approaches have a maximum gradient you can have the slope at. For wheelchair access to domestic houses, this is 1:12 — so every 12 metres you will rise up by 1 metre… so already you’re into long lengths.
But… that’s not all… there’s maximum lengths you can make a ramp… if you need to go higher then you need to allow for a flat landing, which have to be fairly decently sized because it’s meant for wheelchair traffic unlike with stairs.
And **then**… just when you think it would be easy to just have a ramp-case like we can have stair cases… you still have to provide sufficient head height for the ramp… which has to be a minimum of 2 metres above the ramp surface just like with stairs… but stairs are more compact.
Elevators/lifts aren’t necessarily more practical… they’re quite simply the only feasible option to allow disabled access between floor levels that have all but the most negligible difference in heights. Ramps are good for small height increases — say the small step up from your driveway to your main door or patio area… but anything else they quickly go from impractical to unsuitable.
Stairs can be much steeper, thus take up a lot less floor space inside the home. There are standards for slope of a ramp. Look at [this image of an accessibility ramp to get up a 2-step stoop](https://assets-global.website-files.com/5f99da1bdbd4ceb10ea49ca5/60272b35a09dbb609fc6dfb5_ramp-incline-calc_portable.jpg) and notice how much more room the ramp needs — and this is for just 2 steps! Now imagine a standard staircase of like 14 steps.
Not only are they not practical (look at all the other responses on this thread) but they can be unsafe as well. Humans aren’t always the best at navigating less than level ground. Stairs allow for a level spot for every step. A ramp does not, allowing for a greater risk of falling.
for a ramp to have the same height as an equivalent set of stairs while taking the same space in the building’s footprint it would result in a ramp that is too steep to be usable(safely).
this is especially bad because the main uses for ramps in building are for loading/unloading cargo(so you would need to handle very heavy loads that for some reason a freight elevator cannot) and for wheelchair accesibility(where you want it to be possible for the user to push themselves up and go down the ramp safely.), for this purpose ramps for buildings are generally no steeper than 1:12(one unit of height requirirng at least 12 units of lenght) and if your ramp is too tall overall youll need ot build it with # landing areas”(flat ares somewhere along the lenght of the ramp where you can rest.)
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