She is also co-chair on accessible transportation and mobility and she will
be talking about her work related to universal design for universal access particularly
related to community transportation and I love the title of her talk , universal
design and public transportation, centrally to the future. Please join me in
welcoming her.
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Jack and Jennifer and the "other" OSU that we so fondly refer to. They have shifted a lot of their administrators West, and we've inherited a significant number of them. I'm going to have a little side bar with Jack and find out why they shifted them West.
I'm delighted to be able to share with you something that I feel particularly passionate about, and that is accessible public transportation and I hope you have fun and at the end, there's time for questions that you might have. We're going to focus today just on surface transportation. I'll leave my airborne pot its behind. If you have any questions we can always address that but we're going to focus today on the ground issues. Next slide, please.
So the see concepts behind accessible public transportation, they must be safe. That's paramount in any Form of transportation and it must be seem less. In other words as you'll see later, all pieces of that trip chain must be accessible. And also we feel very very strongly, it must be dignified and you heard a little bit about that today when Valerie Fletcher talked at lunch. You'll find that there's certain common things that I'm going to mention that she mentioned earlier. No, we didn't coordinator collaborate. It's just that these are really important things to us, and I'm going to introduce a new term that I'm hoping will start to break down some conceptual roadblocks and that is the term of community public transportation. Next slide, please.
A little outline just to tell you a little bit about our center, the national center for accessible transportation. A little introduction to what we're talking about. A few definitions on public transportation because I know many of you may be beneficiaries of but you don't use it all the time. A universal design for universal access you already heard a little bit about that earlier and how to be a change engine, how to move these ideas into action and to talk about my very favorite city in the world and that is Vancouver, British Columbia, also my hometown a long time ago. Next slide, please.
We work on projects, a number of them, that are trying to move to improve access for people with disabilities to public transportation, and that's not just people with visible disabilities, but there are people with many invisible disabilities, sensory and cognitive ones as well. Next slide, please.
And as I said at the outset, we feel very strongly that it must be safe. It must be interconnected and that means all of the pieces of trip chain must be accessible, but mostly, we also want to make sure that the travel trip is dignified. For some of you that travel by air and use mobility AIDS, you may wonder about that definition. We're trying to make it better.
Now, I said at the outset I wanted to introduce a new term and that is a term of public or community public transportation. Public transportation grows out of the places that it serves , so this community and public transportation systems that you encounter in Columbus, Ohio, really reflect in some ways to ask the community that it serves. Portland, Oregon's public transportation system is a really good reflection of the community that it serves, and same with New York. So it doesn't matter what the size of the community is, but that public transportation piece is a key element of that community. And if we can have universal design, we can make those systems accommodating for all people and that includes my 87 year old mother who with disdain we took her driver's license away and then she says well, I'd have to ride with those people, never in her life but then when she discovers that her friends are on Board maybe it's not so scary.
But one of the things we need to do is we start looking at aging America, which we are all getting older and I would just also point out that we are aging at the same rate in case you were wondering about that and at some time we may also have to give up that right or some of us would like to convey privilege of driving. We want to make sure that you have alternatives there that allow you to stay within your home and community and not be forced to move from where you are living.
So these are some of the things that we like to talk about are the community. Next slide, please.
You skipped one.
I skipped one?
So, why is it important? Because it's important for life, liberty, and freedom. This is taken from the freedom act. Community transportation. It has a distinct and very intimate relationship to land use and life function, particularly the surface modes. And for many of you, I come from Oregon. I think we are the -- one of the toughest states in the country when it comes to land use and use of land. Next slide, please.
So what do we mean by life function? We mean opportunities for education, employment, enjoyment, recreation, of course shopping, we talked about that at lunch, medical, housing, and just social interaction. And that's one of the reasons that I left the clinical rehab world actually and started to work in transportation because I realized that accessible transportation opens a door for thousands and thousands of individuals. I'll talk a little bit more about that in our case study of Vancouver. Next slide, please.
And I'm going to just focus today on our surface transportation modes; okay? I'm an engineer so we use sort of geeky terms like rubber tire, to define a vehicle that runs on rubber tires, and it may be four is usually the minimum, seing ways rr or a mobility devise but not necessarily public transportation so generally the vehicle has rubber tires that interface and steel tire is what we refer to from a street car, an urban rail, commuter rail- type mode and also the main cities of the world have water, and so passenger ferry is usually an important element or mode of the public transportation system. Next slide.
So what we want to do with this term community is to break down some of these conceptual s ilos. I've been working in the public transportation world for over 25 years and I've served on a number of federal committ its and one of the things that I find incredibly frustrating is the myth. Well, you can't put school children on public transportation. Why not! Because in many places, they do that. Or you couldn't have school children riding on the senior bus. Why not? They're actually better behaved if grandma is there. Believe me, they really are. So we have to try to look at breaking down these s ilos and sometimes these are artificial and sometimes they're -- well in my jurisdiction it was a county line. Like well we can't cross the county line. Well, why not? The federal offices are in the next county. It only took ten years to get the bus across the county line and it got there. So it brings you to that word coordination. So if you start to break down those conceptual s ilos, you start to get people working together and collaborating, you start to build sustainable partnerships and I'm proud to say that Oregon has been a leader in this whole area of coordinated public transportation and we're used as a model system, but it wasn't an easy battle. It's taken a long time to break down the s ilos or sometimes simply say well why can't the bus go across the county line? It doesn't know there's a county line there. Next slide, please.
This next picture for those of you that may be visiting online or visually
impaired, this is a 12-step trip chain. No pun intended. It starts with the
origin, pre-trip information, accessible websites very important, making sure
that people know when they are going to be picked up and so that they can make
arrangements, minimizing the amount of advanced planning that is necessary for
a trip. Making sure that schedules can be real-time. Sometimes a doctor's appointment
takes longer than one anticipates. Making sure that that interface or what we
call a transition zone that could be a stop and a station, a terminal, that
they're all accessible and that you have in whatever mode that you need real-time
and emergency information, particularly at the point of departure. And that
then by whatever mode you're going to travel, that you may have off vehicle,
on vehicle payments but those are in accessible modes so you aren't relegated
to have a different payment method, that it is universal and that everyone can
use it.