(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 461: Sausage Making and the ADA

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re at the Mpact conference in Phoenix and joined by Ron Brooks of Accessible Avenue. We chat about service animal etiquette, the negotiation and implementation of ADA, and including people with disabilities in the equity conversation.

To listen to this episode, find it at Streetsblog USA or on our hosting site.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript:

Jeff Wood (3m 32s):
Well, Ron Brooks, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Ron Brooks (3m 44s):
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Jeff Wood (3m 46s):
Well, we’re glad you’re here. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Ron Brooks (3m 50s):
I am a 30 year veteran of the public transportation industry. All of that time has been in Accessible transit for folks with disabilities or paratransit, and about half of it is public agency. The other half is private sector. Done a lot of different things. Began at Bart doing Accessible station design, planning work, community outreach, helping get them set up with paratransit. Initially it was brand new back then. Spent some time in Florida, some time out here in Phoenix where I live now, working for the transit agency and moved on to my own company and doing some work for another company called Serv.

Ron Brooks (4m 36s):
So been in the industry. Love it. It’s all I’ve done.

Jeff Wood (4m 40s):
What got you started in transportation? Like what was the spark that got you really interested in the topic?

Ron Brooks (4m 45s):
So as a person who is blind, and I lost my eyesight as a teenager, growing up in a small town in Indiana, I did not ever have the ability to drive a car. And so I was dependent from the very beginning on public transportation. And I loved public transportation because it was the only way I could get out and go places. But it was also frustrating sometimes. And at the time that I got involved in the industry, I was a graduate student at San Francisco State and I thought I was gonna go into Latin American studies and third world development theory and international relations and all these big high flown ideals of changing the world.

Ron Brooks (5m 33s):
But I was so frustrated by challenges of using public transportation as a person who’s blind. And I had an opportunity to go to an advisory committee meeting where the public was invited to provide comments to the transit agency. It happened to be BART about the services that they were providing for people with disabilities. And I honestly went, because I figured if I went, they would have to listen and maybe I could make a difference. I got to the meeting and found out over the course of attending a few that I loved the topic and that the people who worked there were really pretty cool.

Ron Brooks (6m 16s):
They actually wanted to do the right thing. They were trying really hard to do the right things. They didn’t always understand how best to do them. And oftentimes it was a case of competing priorities, money, all the stuff that people in transit understand. And I fell in love with the work, and so I had an opportunity to join the organization as an entry-level planner. It was a lot more practical than saving the world. So I joined.

Jeff Wood (6m 44s):
Did you have any initial experiences with transit that you know made you think differently about the transportation experience for people with disabilities? Like an initial experience where you realized that the transportation system wasn’t necessarily working for you or for others that had disabilities?

Ron Brooks (6m 58s):
I had lots of experiences like that. When I started using transit, it was in the late eighties. At that point I was maybe like a junior in college attending Indiana University in Indianapolis. And I was using the public transit system. It’s a bus system at that time that I think they are more diverse now. And back then buses didn’t run very often, drivers didn’t announce the stops. So I was routinely getting dropped off at the wrong place and not realizing it. And this is before cell phones, so if I got lost, the solution was to figure it out. The other thing that happened often is that buses would pass me up.

Ron Brooks (7m 41s):
And of course, just the challenges of using transit, it didn’t always go exactly where I wanted it to go. It didn’t always run exactly when I wanted it to run. So I had all the challenges that normal non-disabled, everyday pedestrians and transit users have. And I had some of these challenges around accessibility and just using the service as a person who’s blind, so, so that was really where it started and it got me interested in, it’s kind of that saying, if I ran the zoo and I thought of ways that I could make it better, but I wasn’t in a position to do anything. So when the opportunity came up at bart, it was like, oh, now I can actually be part of the system and maybe help make things a little bit better based on the fact that I experience it every day as a person with disabilities who is also a transit user.

Jeff Wood (8m 33s):
So how has transportation evolved since you started working at bart?

Ron Brooks (8m 37s):
Well, that was 30 years ago, so as you can imagine, it’s changed quite a bit. It is certainly more Accessible today than it was back then. There’s obvious things, the fact that there are ramps and lifts on buses and trains, the fact that pretty much all light rail systems, or at least the new ones have level boarding or at least they have level boarding at some doors. We have mobile apps and websites. We have a lot more technology in general. I think those are things obviously that have changed. Certainly the existence of paratransit is more universal. It was not universal when I started. It was still kind of just getting ramped up.

Ron Brooks (9m 18s):
So I think those things have made transit a lot better. And then you add in all the new modes, the partnerships with rideshare providers and and micro mobility providers and micro transit and all the different things that have been implemented. All of those solutions have made transit better for everybody, and a lot of them have made transit better for people with disabilities. I think the things that really haven’t changed are communities are not a lot more Accessible than they were 30 years ago. We certainly have more wheelchair Accessible ramps. We certainly have a few more Accessible pedestrian signals at controlled intersections.

Ron Brooks (9m 58s):
So there are some things that have gotten better, but traffic has also gotten faster. There’s a lot more of it. Intersection designs are a lot more complicated. So the pedestrian environment where transit operates is probably a little bit harder than it was back in the late eighties, early nineties. But I think transit itself has gotten much more Accessible, but it’s now dealing with many more challenges than it had to back then.

Jeff Wood (10m 25s):
You’ve done a lot of work thinking about paratransit. I’m curious if you think that that service that transit agencies provide is working well now

Ron Brooks (10m 32s):
That’s a great question. So when Paratransit was created, first off, it was not what the community, the disability community was seeking, the community was and continues to want full integration of the services that everybody uses. So the community wants to ride buses, trains, micro transit, all the services that we offer to the general public. There are folks who need paratransit. There are folks who cannot use the systems that the industry has created for everybody. So when Paratransit was created, it was the best solution that the industry could come up with at the time, which the industry was willing and able to pay for at the time.

Ron Brooks (11m 18s):
Unfortunately, I think Paratransit has not evolved as much as the rest of the transit industry has evolved. So in most communities, paratransit looks very similar to how it looked in 1992. It’s service that people are required to request a day in advance. It’s service that has negotiated pickups that could be up to an hour before or after the time that the person needs and has requested to be picked up. It is shared ride service, which is fine because all of public transit is shared ride, except that what that creates for people is the complete inability to know how long their trip is gonna take on any given day.

Ron Brooks (12m 3s):
And then the services still, in most communities, the fairs are allowed to be twice as high as fixed drought fairs. So it is a service that I think has not kept up with the kind of evolution and advancement that we’ve seen in the rest of the industry. There are certainly exceptions to that. So we know that it can be made better. There are agencies around the country that are doing things to make paratransit more spontaneous, more easy for folks to use. But those models are not, first off, they’re not required. And so some agencies choose not to do them and they’re just not happening in most communities.

Jeff Wood (12m 43s):
You had a, a blog post that I read where you’re talking about paratransit and some of the improvements that could be made, and I thought it was really interesting. But the one thing that I was wondering about was the idea of a a national ADA Paratransit database. And I’m wondering, you know, what that would entail and why it’s specifically important to do something like that.

Ron Brooks (12m 60s):
When the ADA was passed, eligibility was really a new concept that was built into the law because the idea was folks with disabilities should use fixed drought transit first, and paratransit would be essentially a service of last resort. And there was no kind of universally accepted approach for how to vet people for eligibility. So the ADA created some basic requirements around how long the process could take around the kind of eligibility determinations that an agency could make around the fact that customers could appeal those decisions if they disagreed.

Ron Brooks (13m 43s):
So there was some due process and aside from that, everything was left to each local transit agency to figure out on its own. So you have agencies around the country that use applications, you have agencies that use phone interviews, you have agencies that use in-person interviews, you have agencies that do functional assessments where they take people either out on the transit system or to a simulated environment that mimics the transit environment to try to test their ability to use public transit. And then you have agencies that require professional verification from a third party. And a lot of systems use those different methods in combination with each other.

Ron Brooks (14m 27s):
So the upshot is there’s about a thousand transit agencies in the country, give or take. There’s about a thousand ways you can get eligible. Given that the ADA has a set list of requirements for what constitutes eligibility, it would not be terribly difficult to establish some national guidelines about what a process could look like, or at least a database where people can register once they are eligible so that when they travel to other agencies or when they move to another community, the data can be surfaced so that they don’t have to go through these different processes every single time they move.

Ron Brooks (15m 12s):
Another use for a national database would be for folks who travel. The ADA actually anticipated that people might travel and it established something called visitor eligibility. Every agency administers that process a little differently. It tends to be very idiosyncratic and bureaucratic. The fact is, is you could have a database where once someone is eligible, any agency in the country could hit that database, find that person, verify their eligibility, and provide them services. A visitor that would be relatively easy to do. Now obviously with databases there are security issues, there’s privacy issues, but those are things that can be worked out.

Ron Brooks (15m 53s):
Customers could opt in or not based on their preference. So this is a long-term project. It’s not something that’s gonna happen quickly. Transit agencies like to have autonomy in certain areas, and certainly paratransit has been one because it’s expensive. So it’s not something that’s gonna happen tomorrow. But I do know that there are many people within the community who have disabilities who would really like to have a simpler process for using paratransit when they travel and when they move. And this could help with both of those.

Jeff Wood (16m 24s):
The other issue you brought up was cost and the doubling of a regular fare. I mean, that’s really important because you know, we were talk a lot about trying to figure out how to lower fares for people and make it Accessible, but that double fare is just seems like somewhat of a barrier.

Ron Brooks (16m 38s):
So let me just actually take it in a slightly different direction. Sure. When the ADA was negotiated and it was negotiated, it had to be passed through the Congress and the Senate and it had to then be signed by the President. And of course, legislation is sausage and the ADA was no exception. When the ADA was being negotiated and finalized, there were concerns from the industry about the cost of paratransit. And given the fact that paratransit was going to be treated as a civil right, there’s no limit on the number of trips a a person can take. There’s no limit on the purposes that they can take the trip for. The only lever that the industry had to have any control over demand, which was completely unknown, was cost.

Ron Brooks (17m 25s):
So cost was negotiated and essentially a deal was made that in order to encourage people with disabilities who ultimately are the ones who make decisions about whether or not to use paratransit in order to encourage them to use the bus when they could, or the train or whatever was in their community, there was an agreement made to double the fare for paratransit or to allow agencies to double the fare for paratransit. It was never equal. It was never equitable. It was negotiated. So fast forward to 2020 and the pandemic and the George Floyd killing and all the things that came from those awful events, one of which was an awakening in our industry of the idea of equity and that we should be providing services in a way that our customers, the people we serve, are getting comparable results from what we do.

Ron Brooks (18m 26s):
We’ve talked about, you know, race equity, we’ve talked about equity for folks in marginalized communities. We’ve talked about folks who have, you know, limited resources and how to create equity for them. And this is really a matter of equity. It is fundamentally unfair to charge people twice as much simply because they have a disability that prevents them from being able to use the fixed route transit system. And that needs to be changed. It, it is fundamentally inappropriate to keep charging disabled people twice as much. And the challenge is the law allows it and paratransit is expensive, so that’s gonna be a tough sell.

Ron Brooks (19m 9s):
But if we truly believe in equity and if we truly believe that it is wrong to charge people twice as much because they’re disabled, then we really have no choice but to take this issue on.

Jeff Wood (19m 21s):
In addition to that, I mean, you’ve said people with disabilities need to be included in the, in the diversity, equity and inclusion frameworks that are being constructed in addition to the cost issue. What other issues come up when you’re thinking about those frameworks and how disabled people fit into that?

Ron Brooks (19m 37s):
I think that the most obvious and first place I would go is one of the things that the disability community says, and it’s kind of a mantra within a community, is nothing about us without us. The people who make decisions in our industry are the people who work in our industry and the people who sit on boards, who oversee the people who work in our industry. And at this point, we don’t have any real good idea of how many folks with disabilities are working in the industry. The organization com to has done some work around this. They’ve done a survey and, and I think their preliminary results were somewhere around 5% of people admitted on a survey to have a disability.

Ron Brooks (20m 17s):
What we don’t know is, first off, is that, is that number legit? It was a pretty small sample. It’s not generally tracked. We don’t know how many folks with disabilities are serving in senior leadership roles. I can tell you it is a very, very, very small percentage. We don’t know how many people with disabilities are represented on boards, transit boards. So the first thing we need to do is figure out how do we make our industry a place that welcomes people with disabilities as employees, as leaders, and as board members. And we need to do it because one of the advantages that I have as a leader in the industry is I have lived experience. I know how the services that I help manage impact people with disabilities because they impact me directly and the impact people that are close to me, both in my family and in my network of, you know, friends and associates.

Ron Brooks (21m 10s):
And that gives me the ability to make better decisions. And if there are more folks with disabilities in the industry leading in the industry and serving on boards in the industry, they will make better decisions as well. Once we are doing that, or maybe at the same time we need to start looking at everything we do through that same lens of equity that we talk about for other groups. Are we serving people with disabilities in a way that allows them to travel in our community using the services that we provide with the same level of effort and the same amount of time and at the same cost as other passengers?

Ron Brooks (21m 51s):
And keep in mind that folks with disabilities are experience much higher levels of poverty, lower levels of employment, they are living on the edge in many instances and we’re asking them to use services that take longer and that cost more. And we need to, we need to recognize that and start challenging ourselves to make that change.

Jeff Wood (22m 15s):
The US Access Board recently issued its final rule on the public right of way accessibility guidelines. So pro, which has kind of been seen as under the radar wind for people who focus on street design and transportation. Where are we in that process and and how do you feel about the guidelines?

Ron Brooks (22m 30s):
The guidelines are good in terms of what they require. One challenge in those guidelines is that they only apply as agencies or cities or municipalities replace infrastructure or build new infrastructure. And I think there are some of us within the community that would like to see those regulations implemented more quickly. And particularly around things like Accessible, pedestrian signals. For me as a blind person, a challenging street crossing with an inaccessible pedestrian signal that doesn’t have audible cues or for folks that are deaf or, or deafblind vibrant tactile indicators which are required in a new standard, but they don’t exist in most intersections.

Ron Brooks (23m 17s):
And for me that that barrier is just like the lack of a curb cut for a person in a wheelchair. So I think some of us would like to see municipalities and covered entities be expected to put those kinds of infrastructure improvements on a schedule, much like they would do curb cuts. That is not how Pro A works currently at this point. It is a standard which has been issued by the access board. It will not be enforceable as law until the Department of Transportation and the Department of Justice implement it as through a rulemaking process. And that’s just simply how the ADA becomes enforceable because the DOT and the Department of Justice enforce the ADA.

Ron Brooks (24m 3s):
So in order for them to enforce it, it has to be introduced and through a rulemaking process and put into the law. So that’s kind of where it sits. Both of those agencies, by the way, can, they can exceed the standards that have been established by the access board, but they can’t go below those standards. So the access board has built a floor. The only question is, is that where it’s gonna end up? And that’ll happen in a rule making that’s hopefully gonna come around early in 2024.

Jeff Wood (24m 33s):
Are there any cities or agencies that have adopted rules that are similar or are good examples of good implementation?

Ron Brooks (24m 41s):
I actually don’t know the answer to that. I don’t think there are. I mean, California would be the place I’d look because they have a separate accessibility standard at the state level, but I’m not sure if it exceeds the new Pro act.

Jeff Wood (24m 53s):
You mentioned sausage making in dc which is something that’s very complicated and, and always, you know, brings out different ideas about what should go and not go in legislation. But the IIJ is now two years old. Is there anything in the infrastructure bill that made big improvements on the issues that you’re interested in and care about?

Ron Brooks (25m 10s):
I’m not sure if this is IIJ or if it’s the omnibus transportation bill, but the all station accessibility program that Senator Duckworth got introduced and got passed, I think is, is a good piece of legislation for rail station accessibility. It feels a little bit limiting because it allocated funding to certain systems and if you’re not in one of those areas then you may not get as much benefit. But one of the nice things that it does is I think as the industry learns from implementations that happen, you know, through these bills in places where it gets funded, they can learn from that and they can use that in other areas. This stuff will just continue to get easier.

Ron Brooks (25m 52s):
I mean, anytime you have the kind of infrastructure spending that IIJ included, I think it, you know, certainly there’s spillover effect for folks with disabilities. And keep in mind, I mean we are all pedestrians unless we’re driving a vehicle. So we benefit from improvements to the pedestrian environment, even if they’re, you know, if, if you put a sidewalk in, that’s not specifically for me, but I benefit as a pedestrian, right? Because it’s gonna come with curb cuts and it’s gonna come with detectable warning strips at those curb cuts. So I mean it again, the benefits are gonna spill over.

Jeff Wood (26m 24s):
You have a yellow Labrador retriever Yep. As a service animal sitting under the desk right here actually. Yep. I know many people might not think of it this way, but would you consider him a transit provider?

Ron Brooks (26m 33s):
That’s a funny question. I’m gonna say not exactly. It’s interesting in some ways he makes transportation easier, certainly navigating the community and in some ways he makes transportation harder. We are at a time in history where there’s been some backlash against people with service animals because of the claims by so many people of pets as service animals when they aren’t, and getting into public spaces or ride share vehicles and misbehaving and, and as a result, the number of times that we face discrimination because of other people’s experiences or ignorance has actually gone up.

Ron Brooks (27m 16s):
It’s actually worse now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. So right now I would say it’s kind of a mixed bag. There are folks with disabilities who use service animals that will tell you that, you know, they face challenges on a regular basis trying to use ride shares because drivers deny their access with their service animal and it’s a difficult problem to take on. So I would say that he provides an awful lot of help with transportation, but it is not without its cost. What

Jeff Wood (27m 48s):
Should folks know about service animals in public or, or even on transit?

Ron Brooks (27m 52s):
First off, if it’s really a service animal, it should be acting like one. And generally you can tell. So if a service animal is, you know, guiding a person with a harness that’s probably a service animal. If they are walking alongside somebody who’s using a mobility device, wheelchair, scooter, whatever, that’s probably a service animal. If they are behaving themselves, that’s good too. And the things that I think people can do as good citizens is one is really just ignore the service animal. you know, you can certainly admire it from a distance, but when you try to interact with a service animal, it’s distracting for the animal.

Ron Brooks (28m 36s):
They’re friendly, generally they’re trained not to be vicious or you know, dangerous. However, because they’re friendly, if you interact with them, they can become distracted. And when they’re distracted, they are not providing the service that they’ve been trained to provide. So it’s really helpful to ignore the service animal and let them do their work. If you see somebody who has an animal that is really, really out of control and doesn’t appear to be a service animal, it’s not really a very good idea probably to confront that person. But it might be a good idea to get somebody from the establishment or the transit system or wherever you happen to be and say, Hey, that animal’s not acting appropriately.

Ron Brooks (29m 16s):
I will tell you that as a person who has a legitimate service animal, I actually, and I know this is true for other service animal handlers, we like it when the rules are enforced against people who are bringing inappropriately trained or fraudulently claimed animals on as service animals. They create harm, they create risk for me and my service animal and they create this kind of societal backlash that I have to deal with on a pretty regular basis. So we’re very happy if you help us encourage better behavior,

Jeff Wood (29m 52s):
I’m sure they get lots of, lots of pets and loves it at home.

Ron Brooks (29m 55s):
So what we like to say is the dog actually works for praise and he works for affection. And most people, and I would say all of the legitimately trained service animals, the people who are handling those animals are given guidance on how important praise and affection are. Sometimes they also have to be redirected and corrected. That’s also part of it. So it’s a positive negative kind of thing. And you know, this dog certainly gets both in abundance. Yeah.

Jeff Wood (30m 23s):
You mentioned that people at agencies are really looking to help but sometimes don’t really know how to approach the issues people with disabilities face. Was there ever a time there it was hard to convince somebody that there was an issue that needed to be addressed?

Ron Brooks (30m 34s):
You know, I think people want to do the right thing and it, it is hard sometimes to help people see that there’s an issue when they don’t have any experience of the issue themselves. So if you talk to somebody about the challenges of using paratransit who has no experience with how those challenges play out in real life, it may be hard for them to understand what’s so hard about calling a day ahead. you know, what’s so hard about being ready during a 30 minute pickup window and waiting either at your door or at the curb in front of your house, it, it’s a small price to pay for a really expensive service.

Ron Brooks (31m 16s):
So it, it is hard sometimes to convince people or to help them see how those challenges accumulate. I think the value is really in, there’s a couple of things. One is folks with disabilities really telling their story in terms of what it’s like to live as a person with a disability. And I’ve, I spent a lot of time and effort doing that. And it’s not all bad. I mean, sometimes it’s good stuff, but it’s really helping people just understand the nuances of life as a person with a disability using the kind of transit that’s available or not available. And I think the other piece is really, and I heard somebody talking about doing this at another agency, is taking board members out and just going on trips, getting with a transit board member, going out using the transit system together and just kind of showing them how it works or doesn’t work.

Ron Brooks (32m 12s):
Where the pain points are so they can see it directly, I think are a couple of things that we can do to help people once people see that there’s an issue, if they are ethical and if they’re in this industry for the right reason. And I think most people are, they usually try hard to make things better, you know, to the level that they’re able, given their responsibility and the funding they have and the rules they have to work with.

Jeff Wood (32m 37s):
There was a recent, recently a national campaign that folks put on the, the week without driving. And I think that that’s really helpful to have elected officials and others, you know, have a week where they decide that they’re not gonna drive their car and they’re gonna try to, you know, take transit and figure out how to, how to do things that way. And, and I think it’s been somewhat successful at changing some minds. I don’t know if you’ve, you’ve seen this or heard of it, but it’s an interesting idea to get people to take more transit and, and think about it from that perspective.

Ron Brooks (33m 1s):
I’ve definitely heard of it and one of the things I like is one of the things that a lot of transit agencies have done over the years and certainly places where I’ve worked have done it, is encourage people to get out and ride the system. Of course, I always rode the system, it was how I got to work. So for me it was like, okay, got it. Check. But a lot of people would come into work in their car, they’d park and then they’d take a bus pass and they’d ride around the system when it didn’t really matter. Put yourself out there when it does matter, when you don’t have a plan B, because plan B is in the garage at home, it, it gives you a perspective that’s closer to what your customers in transit feel.

Ron Brooks (33m 41s):
And that’s one of the things I like about the leave, you know, kind of leave your car at home week is it forces you to actually be a commuter who’s dependent on transit as opposed to just taking a joy ride.

Jeff Wood (33m 55s):
Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times, like I, I, I have a dentist in the East Bay and I don’t have a car and I, I, I’ll try to, you know, have an appointment at four, but you know, you stop in the trans Bay tube and then you, you know, you wait on the other side and then there might be a delay somewhere and then it’s getting closer to the time that you’re supposed to be at the office. And then there’s been a couple times where I had to call them and be like, look, I’m not gonna be able to make it. And it, it’s frustrating to have that kind of delay and miss, although, you know, if I had driven my car at rush hour in the Bay area, it probably would’ve taken like three hours. So, you know, the transit is actually the better option. But having that frustration is real. People

Ron Brooks (34m 27s):
Really want, I think people can put up with a lot, but the challenge that folks face when they’re dependent on transit and it’s, this is true in your car, but it’s really true on paratransit. Yeah. Is the unpredictability of service. It’s not so much that you have to share a trip. And I’ve done a little bit of informal serving within the community. I haven’t done a pro, like a formal project, but if somebody wants to fund it, I’m totally open. But to really try to survey priorities and in the surveying that I’ve done or the informal polling that I’ve done, people love on-demand service, direct ride, no share. It’s like using a car. That’s what I mean.

Ron Brooks (35m 7s):
Ultimately, of course that’s what people want. That’s what everybody wants. When you get into the nuances of, okay, it’s gonna be shared ride service, people are okay with that. The things that matter most are the ability to book on the same day because we don’t often or always know are plans ahead of time. The second thing that they really want is a predictable travel time in Paratransit. They wanna know, even if it’s a long trip, that they can pretty much predict how long it’s gonna be day in and day out. And that’s something that’s hard to get to on a shared ride system where all the variables change from day to day. But that’s really what people want because if they can’t plan their travel time, they have to assume worst case, which means they spend a lot of time waiting, either waiting to be picked up or they get to a drop off early and they’re waiting, you know, to go in for that appointment or whatever they got there for Paratransit really is the waiting game and you’re waiting on one end of the trip or the other.

Ron Brooks (36m 3s):
Yeah. And that, that’s the part that people don’t like.

Jeff Wood (36m 6s):
Yeah. My grandmother used Paratransit a fair amount and you’d have to call ahead of time, you know, a week ahead of time. I think when she was having to call, they put you on a list and they didn’t know when they were gonna come see if she had a hair appointment or something. You never knew if you were actually gonna make it or not. Right.

Ron Brooks (36m 18s):
Yep. And those are the things that people struggle with. Yeah. One of the things that I do in the industry is I work with a company called User and it’s a paratransit TNC. So you know, the idea is we’re gonna take a TNC platform like you know, Lyft or Uber, but we’re gonna credential and train all the drivers. We’re gonna put ’em through transit background checks, I mean all the stuff that we do for transit. And then we’ll provide direct rides, door to door, no stops. And people love the service because they get all of the quality that Paratransit provides and they also get predictability, which is what they really, really want from service.

Jeff Wood (36m 53s):
Is there a topic that you wish more people asked you about?

Ron Brooks (36m 56s):
I’m not sure I talk so much. I dunno if I can come up with one. I think we’ve probably covered it today. Yeah. I really want to help people understand how to think about transportation equity with a disability lens in mind. And we did talk about that, but that is something that I think we don’t, we haven’t really talked about enough in our industry. We still, I think, have a perspective that folks with disabilities are, how do I say it? I think we see them as different and we see their needs as different. So we tend to undervalue things like time and quality because I think there’s a belief that they’re disabled, they’re probably not going to work because a lot of them are unemployed.

Ron Brooks (37m 44s):
So I don’t think we give the same value to some of the pain points that they experience. We, we would never, as an industry, we would never subject our commuters for the most part and never Choice Riders, which is a phrase that we don’t, we don’t use it as much anymore. Yeah. Because it kind of fell out of favor ’cause it’s not very equitable. Yeah. But we all still know that, we still think about it, we still think about our commuters and we still think about choice riders even if we don’t use those words. And we would never, on our worst day, put choice riders through what we put our paratransit riders through. We wouldn’t think of it because we wouldn’t have them.

Ron Brooks (38m 25s):
And I think we need to start thinking about all of our riders as their time is valuable, their money is precious and limited, and we have an obligation to serve all of them so that they can reach the community with dignity, with spontaneity. And when we start to think that way, we will automatically have a more equitable approach to service. That is a conversation that I think we have begun to have, but we have a lot of conversations still to have.

Jeff Wood (38m 53s):
Do you think the pandemic and kind of what’s happened with commuter ridership is gonna change that conversation? Or do you think it’s inertia?

Ron Brooks (39m 1s):
I think that the pandemic and the, some of the challenges coming out of the pandemic have helped us recognize the need to take care of our riders in general. I don’t think we’ve really honed in on the disability piece yet.

Jeff Wood (39m 20s):
One of the things that you think about in your work also is, is engagement. I’m wondering what some of the strategies are to make sure you’re hearing from folks that need to be heard.

Ron Brooks (39m 28s):
The first part is just Accessible making sure that you’ve designed your outreach to be Accessible. So people with disabilities are in all the same places as people without disabilities. They are, they’re online, they are using smartphones. I just read some data, I think it’s from Pew, that 72% of people with disabilities have smartphones. And I, I can’t tell you how many times I hear why do we need to bother with a paratransit mobile app because most of those people are older and they don’t use smartphones. Well, 72% of people with disabilities have smartphones and that number is actually going up more quickly than the national number. The, the overall number’s 88% according to the same survey from Pew.

Ron Brooks (40m 11s):
So it’s behind, but it’s catching up. So part of it is just really recognizing that we need to make our outreach efforts Accessible so that they’re hearing it. We need to be obviously be out in the community just like we would for anybody else when we’re thinking about a capital project, a new line or a new station or something that we’re gonna build or something that we’re gonna change or service changes or fair increases. you know, we go to community meetings, we go to the public. We need to start incorporating the disability community into those efforts. We need to start thinking about, okay, where, you know, what organizations should we be meeting with? What are the places, community centers, you know, that these folks are are maybe at that we need to go to?

Ron Brooks (40m 56s):
And really making sure we’re hitting those, those spaces. This is actually community engagement is work that I’m actually working on a project right now to develop essentially a book that focuses on how do we design Accessible community engagement. And we’re focusing on virtual meetings in-person meetings and also feedback mechanisms like online surveys and kind of some of the tools we use to engage with the public. Because I think really it starts just with making sure that, that we do this in an Accessible way and that we factor the community into as we’re planning that work. I don’t think there’s rocket science.

Jeff Wood (41m 34s):
Yeah. Last question, in addition to the book, what are you working on now and what are you most excited about?

Ron Brooks (41m 40s):
It’s a hodgepodge. So I wear two hats in the industry. I wear my Accessible Avenue hat, which is my company. And we are focusing on, we’re doing quite a bit of training right now. We’ve done quite a bit of training around wayfinding, making that more Accessible wayfinding to and from transit and within transit systems. We have been really trying to speak and be engaged in the dialogue around accessibility of autonomous vehicles, both for transit use but also for private use, which would look more like ride share. Of course a lot of our agencies are doing ride share pilots, so that’s relevant. We are also working on doing a lot of presentations around service animals and I, I think that was just one that was a labor of love for me personally and it’s something that a lot of people have questions about.

Ron Brooks (42m 25s):
So we’re doing those. And of course community engagement is another big chunk and you know, working on a book about that. And we also do quite a bit of training in that space. The other thing that I, or the other hat that I wear is, is with this company called Serv that does is a transportation network company designed to be Accessible for people with disabilities and deliver paratransit. And I do stakeholder work for them to make sure that they are connected to the community that they’re serving AKA people with disabilities and older adults. I’m also helping them with some policy work to just make sure that as a transportation industry, we are really holding the line on the importance of things like drivers who are trained and credentialed to provide service in a way that public transit can be proud of.

Ron Brooks (43m 17s):
So those are the things I’m working on. I think I’m most excited about the fact that we are having good dialogue as an industry. We are starting to talk about equity for people with disabilities. We are starting to ask the questions, can we make paratransit better? Is it time to change some of these things that we’ve been doing for 30 years? Those are good questions. We’re early in the dialogue. There’s a lot to be done, but it starts with those questions and that conversation and we are in that space now, so that’s really exciting.

Jeff Wood (43m 51s):
Awesome. Well, where can folks find you if they want some help with how to make their transit systems better?

Ron Brooks (43m 56s):
You can find me at Accessible Avenue dot net and we’ve got, you know, pretty basic website, but you can opt in for some of our communications. We have a blog Avenue update which posts every other week. Usually we have

Jeff Wood (44m 11s):
A I know that. I know that. Yeah.

Ron Brooks (44m 13s):
Right. And then I’m pretty involved and active on LinkedIn. You can find me there. You can find our company page or my personal page and those are really the best ways to reach out. If you want to use email connect at Accessible Avenue dot net also works. So those are some good places to start.

Jeff Wood (44m 30s):
Awesome. Well Ron, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time.

Ron Brooks
Oh, thank you.