By Alec MacDonald
In 1990, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) became federal law. Aimed to combat discrimination against the millions of Americans with physical or mental limitations, it gave these individuals greater access to employment, public accommodations (such as libraries, parks, schools, and restaurants), telecommunications, transportation, and a variety of government services. The ADA still stands today as a watershed piece of legislation, but that doesn’t mean it remains the final word in the pursuit of disability rights.
This cause recently took a small step forward here in the Bay Area with the promise of over $1.5 million toward enhancing disability-related transportation in ways that will surpass the standards set by the ADA. It’s a modest sum of money as far as transportation funding allocations go, but the projects it will help complete should make travel easier for people with disabilities — and in a region with more than 700,000 such residents, that’s invaluable.
The money in question comes to the Bay Area through grants coordinated by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) as part of the national New Freedom Program, which is authorized by 2005’s Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users. According to the Federal Transit Administration, the goal of the New Freedom Program is “to reduce barriers to transportation services and expand the transportation mobility options available to people with disabilities beyond the requirements of the ADA.”
Last November, MTC invited local governments and public transportation operators to submit project applications in competition for the available $1.5 million-plus. Agency staff and members of its Elderly and Disabled Advisory Committee reviewed the 16 tendered applications, and passed recommendations on to the Programming and Allocations Committee for consideration. Then on February 27, MTC adopted a final list of nine projects to receive funding in grants of varying amounts.
The largest of these grants went to the City of Berkeley toward integrating the Ashby BART Station with the Ed Roberts Campus, a multifaceted disability resource facility scheduled to begin construction this year. Named after a late leader of the disability rights movement, the Ed Roberts Campus is a transit-oriented development that will house the offices of seven partner organizations, along with meeting rooms, a computer lab, a fitness area, a childcare center, and a café. And, thanks to nearly $700,000 from the New Freedom Program, the facility will feature a special helical ramp, a pair of oversized elevators, and an elevator lobby.
Susan Henderson, executive director for one of the campus partner organizations (the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund), described how these planned amenities exceed ADA specifications. With five-foot-eight-inch by eight-foot-five-inch floors, the elevators will have room for several wheelchairs, which will be able to conveniently roll straight through the carriage using front and back doors. Henderson also mentioned plans to eventually include technology that will automatically recognize wheelchairs, bypassing the need for button pressing. As for the ramp, it will serve as the focal point of the facility’s interior.
“People always think of wheelchair ramps as additions, as opposed to core structures,” said Henderson, who went on to note that without ramps, emergency situations can become all the more perilous for people in wheelchairs. These and many other concerns are anticipated by the “universal design” employed in the planning of the entire Ed Roberts Campus, whose website (www.edrobertscampus.org) defines the term as “making products, communications, and the built environment more usable by as many people as possible at little or no extra cost.”
The grant from the New Freedom Program filled in the final piece of a $36 million construction budget for the facility, and with a groundbreaking scheduled this year, it could be open for use by the beginning of 2010.
MTC awarded the grant on the basis that the project serves the functions of mobility management and improving transit station accessibility, two of several types of activities eligible for funding under the program. Other eligible activities include enhancing paratransit, establishing feeder service to transit systems, conducting rider training programs, purchasing vehicles, providing rider vouchers, and sustaining volunteer driver programs. Nearly all of these activities are represented among the rest of the eight projects receiving grants:
• AC Transit, in conjunction with three other agencies, will complete an inventory of transit resources in the East Bay toward setting up a mobility management structure.
• The City of Benicia will expand the Benicia Breeze Taxi Scrip Program to include destinations in Concord, Martinez, Pleasant Hill, and Walnut Creek.
• The Central Contra Costa Transit Authority will offer maintenance subsidies on vans to be used by community-based organizations for paratransit service.
• The Central Contra Costa Transit Authority will also complete an inventory of transit resources in Contra Costa and the Tri-Valley Area toward setting up a mobility management structure.
• The Contra Costa County Employment and Human Services Department will expand volunteer driver programs.
• The San Mateo County Transit District will furnish Peninsula Ride Connection mobility management services for seniors and people with disabilities in San Mateo County.
• The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency will evaluate and further develop a pilot program that translates bus arrival information into speech at bus shelters.
• The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Agency will administer a three-year travel training program.
In total, these projects cover plenty of ground, but they actually represent just the start of New Freedom Program funds flowing to the Bay Area.
MTC’s Christina Atienza, who manages the New Freedom Program for the agency, explained that an additional $5.1 million is in the pipeline, to be distributed in future calls for projects (an exact timetable for this has yet to be determined). These future allocations and the grants listed above do not account for all the New Freedom Program money available to the region, either. Rather, they represent funds intended only for designated large urban areas with populations greater than 200,000 (the Bay Area has five of these, based around Antioch, Concord, San Francisco-Oakland, San Jose, and Santa Rosa).
New Freedom Program dollars are also reserved for designated small urban areas with populations between 50,000 and 200,000 (of which the Bay Area has seven, based around Fairfield, Gilroy-Morgan Hill, Livermore, Napa, Petaluma, Vacaville, and Vallejo), as well as rural areas with populations less than 50,000. The California Department of Transportation, not MTC, is in charge of coordinating the grant assignments in these two types of areas, in a process that encompasses the entire state and takes place along a different schedule. The first round of project applications were due on April 2, and a final project list should be adopted this summer — with the Bay Area targeted to receive roughly one quarter of the $1.1 million available for small urban areas statewide, and an unspecified share of the nearly half a million available for rural areas.