middle of the three doors because that is the area that has the least signal interference and offers us the best chance of a good workable system. we will also display the international symbol for the induction system in that area. flipping to slide six. features for individuals who have a mobility impairment. we have a range of features for people who have a mobility impairment. one of them i don't have listed on the slide first of all is we will have 50 percent more seats that are priority seats for people with disabilities or senior citizens. so i think that is going to be a big improvement. in addition, those priority

seats will be a different color. one of the things that we heard early in the project when we put out that solicitation, i referenced earlier what you like or dislike about the old train cars? we often heard people say that can ustomers don't frequently enough yield to senior and disabled seats to those who need them the most. one of the improvements we are making is to make those seats a different color and to improve the signage of those seats to help encourage people to stand up and yield those seats. in addition to those seats we will have two wheelchair zones as the old cars do that comply with the dimensions required by code of federal registry 1192 which is

the ada code for rapid transit. one of the comments that we had from the public early on was that people often stand in the wheelchair zone and our signage is on the wall and the people standing there block the signage. so as other people board, they don't realize it's a priority zone and don't yield it without being asked to. for that reason, we made the decision to install, em bed actually a wheelchair symbol in the floor in the area and we think that will encourage people to be more courteous. we were also in the design process able to remove for lack of a better term, a bulge in the wall in the wheelchair area which really pushed wheelchair

users further out into aisle. by removing that bulge, it moves it out of the flow of traffic. we also talked about the lcd screens. we couldn't put them on all walls and had to make the choice of what seats would have the best visibility for those screens and we ended up choosing to put them directly across from the wheelchair zone. the seats themselves by popular demand including from a lot of people with disabilities are a little bit higher off the floor. the old seats were much lower than other transit systems. i don't know why. that was a decision made probably 50 years ago, but when we went out early in the project and compared the

seat height of our cars with other transit systems, we found ours was by far the lowest and really didn't know why. so we've now raised them up. we tested different heights, with the general public and also people with different denlts -- disabilities and people with different height stature and found 18 -inch height was suggested. we tested higher than that but they fell off especially with shorter individuals. we set the chairs at an 18 -inch height. the higher seats will have secondary effects. they will provide a little higher room for those who have guide dogs as well as more room for leading uggage. now -- leading eading now that bart serves the international

airport. leading uggage is an important component especially with carry on sized bags provide a place they can be tucked out of the way in part to be out of the way for people with disabilities. another improvement that we made on the new train carcinogen credit to the bart task force is to situate the inter comes at the door. before they were away from the cars. it was not at a great location. another complaint we heard early on in the process is we heard bicycles can get in the way of people in wheelchairs. really no blame to any particular group and quite often people were very courteous to each other and that doesn't happen. but it

happened enough that we heard about it. we deliberately did in the new train car because we decided to add a third door to the car, we were able to provide a separate door to encourage bicycles to use that would help prevent as many tangles between bicycles and people with disabilities. finally the new train cars will have wider aisles in the streets. it was great to see that a lot of wheelchair users will have more space to move around and more flexibility to move from one part of the car to another. slide 7 talks about features for individuals who are blind or have a

vision impairment. one feature that will continue from the old cars are the external inter car barriers that are meant to help protect people with vision impairments from inadvertently stepping off the flat form and being in danger. those were retro fitted into old bart cars after ada was passed. but these will be built in from the ground floor to the new cars. i mentioned earlier that we often have people on bart that don't know what the next stop is or other important information like transfer information, the destination of the train, major delay advisories, etc. we have a 42-year-old pa system on most of the cars that doesn't function very well. we also have employees

that occasionally do not make announcements for various reasons, some legitimate and some due to employee performance. with the new train cars, we plan to remedy all of those issues. first of all we'll have a brand new pa system, a modern pa system that will perform much more reliably and with better sound quality. secondly, from the public comments we got decided to go ahead and put in and automated pa system with prerecorded message. it doesn't mean the train operator won't occasionally make messages for certain kind of delays, but at least the next stop, transfer information and route of the train kinds of message will be automated. thirdly, we'll talk

more about the poll in a minute. for people with sight impairment, we did add a contrast the color strip to the pole to provide greater visibility for lower vision individuals. slide 8 talks about a few other major improvements on the new train cars. first of all, i talked already about having more doors. that's going to make getting on and off the train faster and easier and take away for some people that feeling of panic that the doors may close before you have an opportunity to exit. it's going to have a secondary effect of reducing the volume of people going through each door by about a third. i think that's going to be very helpful for people with disabilities as well as

bicyclist and others who might need a little more time to be able to use the doors successfully. secondly, the new cars will have much better cooling systems. the old cars that were designed in the 1960s really were designed for all seated people because at that time bart could accommodate all the demands and seat everyone. and for that reason, the cooling systems were designed to deliver air to the seats, but as bart became more and more successful over the years and as a result more and more crowded and had more standees, we knew it was important to also deliver air to standees standing in the aisle and others. so, the new cars will have much better

modern cooling systems and much broader distribution of air on the car. that's going to be particularly valued by people standing on a hot car on a hot summer day. finally by popular demand because bart cars are quite loud especially the old cars, we have worked on a variety of strategies that will make the new fleet quieter for those on board. we'll be putting in comprehensive -- installation. in addition to those who came to view the car model got to see a demonstration of the new door technology these cars will have. the door technology is called micro plug. for lack of a better description, i

would say they are a little bit like a mini van door. in that it opens to the outside of the vehicle and when it closes it seals away the noise. for those of you that got a chance to see it and hear it, you probably had a feel for how much of an impact that can have. slide no. 9 talks about a tripod pole. one is each to the vestibule of the three doors. the term tripod is the fact that the third pole has three branches to increase the number of people that can hold on to the pole. it provides a stable

hand hold when the train is accelerating or decelerating or lurching. that was requested by people. however, like a lot of other things in life, when you solve one problem you may create new problems. we have had concerns particularly by wheelchair users and people with sight impairments or blind can ustomers. as a result of that feedback which came at first from the bart accessibility task force, we set upon three mitigations. first and most importantly we shifted the pole further away from the designated wheelchair zone. first 3 inches then to 4 inches. what that did is it was just enough of a shift that it opened the accessible

path wider to provide a good accessible path for wheelchair users. just to provide you context on that path, the car doors will be equal in width on the new trains to the old cars. that width is 54 inches which is 4 feet. by moving the pole is in excess of 48 inches wide. it's almost as wide as the door itself. now, the concern that we heard even after we moved, we took that first mitigation was that even though the path was fairly wide, it was people holding

onto the pole that would get in the way of others. so that is currently in front of us. the second mitigation we did was to enlarge the path. i talked about that previously. thirdly we have made a commitment to a public education campaign which we are calling for now cloet the clear -- "the clear of the path campaign". it's on the middle screen and some of you may have seen an example of that on the digital display on some of the train car model events. for those that didn't happen to see that, it's also available on our website at the url i gave earlier. in addition to the visual for those who hear message, we

plan to do audio "clear the path" message that we feel will be effective. we plan to provide prerecorded messages that a train operator can press as they are entering a station. we can run them at regular intervals as well. in particular if a train operator see's as they are entering a station see's a person with a disability, they can add to the frequency of that message by pressing the button. finally in addition to the three mitigations i identified, i call to the attention that a could i part -- key part of enhancing the area for people using

wheelchairs and of mobility will be the reduction of congestion on the new trains. what we hear from a lot of members on our task force is that even with our old train cars without a pole, without any of the other concerns, it is very difficult to board when bart is crowded in the peak period. so i mention that because i think it's probably belongs as a fourth mitigation because really it's as important or even more so than the other mitigations i mentioned. we have to reduce the crowding level on bart. so finally the last slide is called tripod pole options. what i have been doing the last week and will be continuing for the next week is to engage disability organizations and individuals in a discussion of options to

the tripod pole. the current design or at least the schematic of the design is shown on page 10. you can see many of the things that i described in the design. the green seats are the priority seats for people with disabilities and again, there is 50 percent more than we had on the old cars. you can see in the design the three doors, the two wheelchair zones, the designated area for bikes at the middle door to make it separate from the wheelchair areas and other features including the proposed pole locations and i'm sure it's too hard to see from a distance, but it does show the dimensions of the accessible

path and i even need to hold it close to my eyes to read them to you, but the engineering measurement for the path from the doorway to the wheelchair zone is 48.83 inches and the path to the aisle is 42.78 inches. the car that's pictured there is a cab car which is a car that has a train operator space, the cab where it operates. the non-cab cars will look very similar except instead of the cab there, you will have more seating. 40 percent of the bart cars are cab cars and the other 60 percent have more seating than the cab cars. so, we have put

the poles in for a reason. you heard it today. we've also got some issues that we want to work through. i can tell you anecdotally that when we were out talking to 17,000 people the last few weeks, we did hear a lot of people who found the pole valuable. a lot of people with disabilities as well as senior citizens and shorter individuals, people with balance issues, for example. but we also heard loud and clear a lot of people who had issues with the pole. so that's why we are out talking to people. i was at the similar council on the oakland mayor's side earlier this week and i have invited a number of disability organizations to meet with me and talk about how do we find a balance that meets the needs, the diverse needs of different groups. so that concludes my presentation. i

want to again thank all of you for having me here today. and i would be pleased to answer questions or hear your comments. >> thank you very much mr. wine stein for coming here. now we'll take questions from the council. councilmembers, cochairs? cochair supanich? >> hi. thank you very much for your presentation. unfortunately i was unable to get to a real new bart car, but this presentation really made it clear to me what the challenges have been and continue to be. and i just had a few questions about the design. are the cars the same size as the old bart cars, the dimensions inside and outside? >> the outside dimensions are

almost exactly the same. on the inside, we did lose some space. if you look at the figure on page 10, you will see some shaded areas at the very ends of the car. not the cab so much as the other, the non-cab and all the cars. in that shaded space is a safety buffer zone that is in response to emerging safety standards. that's for crash safety. the ends at that shaded space is meant to be a collapsible section of the car that protects the passenger compartment. as a result you can see we lost almost a whole row of seats on each end. we did design the seats to be more space efficient to cover the row we lost. that is one different in terms of the interior dimensions of the new cars. >> then in total do they hold the same number of people

seated and standing? >> the seated part first of all, the new cars will seaton average 53 can ustomers. that averages the carb and non-cars. in the old cars seaton average 58.6. there is a 4.6 seat reduction. it is a common comment that we get from the general public that there are fewer seats and concern about that especially for those riding long distances or those who have a disability that really does require that they not be on their feet for that kind of length of time. fortunately, although we will have fewer seats per car, we will have more seats over all. and what that means is instead of the 669 cars we have today, our fleet size will be much

larger and if we can get to our thousand car goal, we'll net a 38 percent increase in seats in the fleet. that means that 6-7-car trains can be 8 or 9 cars and trains that are already 10 cars, for those situation we are working on an upgrade to our train control system that will allow us to reduce our head way and put in more trains to add more seats. then on the standing room, i'm sorry, the new cars will have approximately 10 percent more standing room. >> okay. i notice there is bike racks. is that on every single car? >> the current proposal is a bike rack at the middle door of all the cars. >> it holds six? >> it holds three bikes per

rack. >> is that going to ease, is that enough? there is a lot of people that use the bikes on bart. really that's where i see a lot of hurt feelings and frustration around bikes and wheelchairs and people who are disabled being in that area. are you confident that this will improve with these cars. i realize if we had more cars, less people per cars that will alleviate the situation. we are still figures from that. is there anything you can do now with bart cars to make it easier for people with disability especially mobility disabilities, but also, well, all, really to get on and off the cars in a manageable manner as the sign is placed. >> so, in terms of the number

of cars we deploy each day we are at our limit. in other words we just, you know, if we had more cars we would put them out there to relieve congestion, but we just don't have them. we have in the last year taken out seats to make more room for bicycles. i know that's helpful for people in a wheelchair when they are not present, they use that space. for new cars for better or worse because we are in that space krungch and the loss for the cars for safety reasons, the new cars will have less floor space, the wheelchair zones will have the same size but bike space are losing about 50 percent of the space. with the organized rack

approach, we can accommodate nearly as many bikes as half the space. >> is that the only place where bikes are allowed? >> there is no rule for bikes to a rack. i think your original question is will there be enough? i think sometimes yes and sometimes no. for perspective bart trains at 700 feet long, with one rack per car will provide enough capacity for 30 bicycles and probably additional one if a bicyclist want to keep their bike with them. it's a fairly significant capacity. >> thank you. >> councilmember wong? >> hi, thank you again for coming out to get this presentation and also for

participating in the outreach and everything. i have one still a little concerned about the color of the priority seating. the lime green or lime yellow. i find that it's really too bright and i know that i understand that it would help people to actually find a seat once you get into car. i try to find it through the transportation regulations, i don't know what they call it to see if there is a color scheme for compliance with the ada. i was suggesting to probably use the international color, well, i don't know if it's international color, but ada

symbol that usually is blue and to basically reconsider the priority seating as ada blue and the other seating would be another color. i was just thinking maybe gray to kind of compliment the train. so, i don't know what is the requirement as far as the color, but if we can at least make it consistent with the american disability's act. i would really like to see that as a suggestion. second part is about the pole. i'm very mixed with that. you know, personally i can't get

around it pretty well with my chair but i'm concerned with those who can't move when it gets very very crowded. i have more concern about that. i know we talked about it in our outreach. i thought i would bring it to this meeting and see what if we can talk about it too. thank you. >> councilmember kostanian? >> thank you. a question, how much more of an increase do you see in size for public accommodation? >> i want to make sure i understand your question. is it in regards to the wheelchair zone? >> possibly yes. >> so, the