IT IS rare for changes to a municipal building code to become headline news. But Vancouver’s ban on doorknobs in all new buildings, which went into effect last month, is an exception. It has provoked a strong reaction from the door-opening public and set off a chain reaction across the country as other jurisdictions ponder whether to follow Vancouver’s lead. The country is on tenterhooks.The war on doorknobs is part of a broader campaign to make buildings more accessible to the elderly and disabled, many of whom find levered doorhandles easier to operate than fiddly knobs. Vancouver’s code adds private homes to rules already in place in most of Canada for large buildings, stipulating wider entry doors, lower thresholds and lever-operated taps in bathrooms and kitchens.The rules have provoked grumbling about the nanny state, much of it from doorknob manufacturers. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association (CHBA) complains that Vancouver, the only city in Canada with the power to determine its own building code (elsewhere it falls to provincial governments), changed the rules on its own, instead of asking for a revision of the national regulations, which would...
via The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1l24IL5
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