department. we received 7 complaints. 5 curb ramp request and one request for accommodation. the majority of complaints were about non-compliant barricades and new construction zones and public right-of-way. another complaint included a power door opener not being turned on and lack of accessible restrooms in a public meeting location and a question about physical accessibility in a physical stabilization room program. people contacted our office looking for information about disability benefits, affordable housing, mental health services and rights to have service and support animals. most of the contacts we received from the p be were people that wanted to contest their parking and traffic tickets and traffic violations. can ustomer

service complaints about muni drivers and taxi drivers not accepting debit cards as form of payment. we were also made aware of by sf mta that the current contract is under noithsz with -- negotiations with the drivers. both parties are had at work with the strike. if this occurs there is transportation available for medical appointments. if a strike would happen, information provided on the para transit website at wchlt website at wchlt sf para transit dom .com. www. paratransit .com. through the trip info automated phone

system to pair a transit kathy n entrance can -- transit can ustomers. call 415-351-7052. the number is 415-351-7052. this past month there has been an increase this calls regarding issues around effective communication for people who are deaf and hard of hearing. we provided a lot of technical assistance to departments and public accommodations about the necessity and legal requirement to provide effective communication in their services and programs. joanna federal -- of our office last month trained the city's ada coordinate or

about ada coordinators. 18 coordinators participated in this training. we think information about communication this past couple months have been connected to the awareness from the training our office conducted. joanna will now go into further detail about some of the technical assistance that our office provided. >> good afternoon, councilmembers, cochairs. so at the end of each directors report they try to highlight a teaching moment for you about a little known fact about ada. so this month, one of the little known facts that was something that i emphasized in my training and also to the city departments is that benefits in effective communication don't just apply to a specific person with a disability or a can ustomer,

but also to the individuals associated with that can ustomer. so case in point, received a call from our county clerk's office who wanted to find out the requirement of whether it was necessary to provide a sign language interpreter for a guest to a civil ceremony. so, a hearing couple decided, they made an appointment to come to city hall and get married in the mayor's balcony. they invited family members and friends and one of them happened to be deaf and requested the use of a sign language interpreter to participate in the ceremony. so, of course that individual is covered under title 2 and

under situations of ada and we are required to pro that accommodation for interpretation even though the person is not the one who is getting married. so that was kind of a tricky concept for some of our staff to figure out, but what was really exciting is that as a result of the ada coordinator's training academy we get more and more folks seeing our office as a resource and actually brought to the departments were actually calling our office to ask for technical assistance before they give a response. that's really exciting news and it goes to our director johnson who was talking about extending the office and building capacity in all of our departments. i know we have an exciting agenda.

thank you. >> thank you very much. that's exciting news from each staff member. moving forward, we have for agenda item no. 6, information item, bart new train cars designed and public input. we have our guest speaker today, aaron wine stein thank you. i have

a short presentation only 10 slides. but there is a lot of information. so, i will go through it and look forward to your questions and comments afterwards. how many of you have had an opportunity to see perrot -- prototypes and models to see our new cars? if you want more information then i have time for a website that i can recommend at bart .gov/cars. so that is bart

.gov/cars. so today i'm going to cover three topics. first some general background information about the project. the second is some specific information about accessible features on the new train cars. and thirdly talk about one of the open issues that's had a lot of discussion in the disability community around the proposed tripod pole. i'm now on slide two which is entitled fleet of the future, why new cars.

bart has very old train cars, as you may have noticed if you have ridden the system. most are 40 years old. the same cars have been running. it's the oldest fleet of train cars among big cities in america. they have performed very well. they have carried billions of rides in the last 42 years. but at their age, they are now using obsolete technology and components are prone to failure more and more as the cars reach the end of their useful life. we have two objectives for the fleet of the future project. the first is to replace the old fleet to avoid delays and breakdowns and provide bart can ustomers which is what they want is

reliable service connecting them from a to b. secondly we at the same time with this project will be not just replacing the old cars, but dramatically increasing the number of cars in the bart fleet to relive crowded conditions on the system and help us prepare for even larger demands of the future. the third slide is entitle fleet of the future. the way forward. and we have 775 new train cars -- on order already. it was a design build contract. so the first segment of it is a design process. none of the cars are being built per say yet, but the assembly will begin very soon on the first 10 what we are

calling pilot cars that are for test purposes to prove safety and to prove reliability. our goal is to have a fleet size of at least 1,000 cars. by comparison, the current fleet has 669 cars. if we achieve our goal of 1,000 cars, it will be a 50 percent increase in the number of cars that are available to our can ustomers. -- can an -- the good news on a dramatic goal is that we have identified 85 percent of the funding needed to purchase the thousand cars. we do have a shortfall of approximately $400 million to purchase the remaining 15

percent and achieve our goal. but we've made a lot of progress on the funding front. bombardey transportation was the company selected to provide the cars. they have been doing a good job so far in the design and engineering process. the final assembly of the new cars will occur in new york state. the contract reaches a two-thirds by america requirement in terms of all of the subsuppliers and parts. can an -- we have gone through a comprehensive design process that is described on slide 3, conceptual design phase preliminary mock ups and prototypes and final train car model. i'm going to talk

about each of those phases. back in 2012, we began the process by asking can an can you customers about what they liked and didn't like about the cars and asked them to include what they have seen in their travels elsewhere that we can consider emulating. we used that information in our process in 2012. we began working with the bart advisory committee. the bart accessibility task force. we worked with them to think in particular about the accessible features of the new train cars and you will see in the slides that follow that there are quite a few features

that have been added to the new train cars that are testament to their hard work and good advice in helping us better meet the needs of people with disabilities. in 2013, we had a variety of preliminary mock ups and prototypes. in july of 2013, we had what is called a soft mock up, a first level mock up of the new train car at the mcarthur station and we had 25,000 people come through and participate and walk through including a special session we did at that time with the bart accessibility task force. subsequent to that, we did 9 events around the bay area testing out prototype seats and getting feedback from the public about different levels of cushioning and different densities of foam and that helped us select the seats

for the new train cars. finally just over the last 6 weeks, we've had the final train car model at 10 different locations around the bart district and including one location in santa clara which is part of the future bart service. and we had a total of 17, 500 can ustomers come through the final train car model and give us feedback. we conducted is surveys as we did with all the previous phases and we are still processing those results and we'll have a report out in the next few weeks. the first pilot cars i referenced earlier, those will be the first 10 cars that assembly will begin in just a few months. they will be at first tested on the bart test tracks. not on what we call

revenue service that can ustomers are using them. they have to be proven safe and reliable before we get them certified for passenger service. once that is done and those cars are proven we'll authorize the beginning of the procession of the 475 cars and perhaps by that time greater number depending on funding. those first production cars are scheduled to go into service in 3 years, in the year 2017. we expect in the first year of production because the production once it starts, it happens pretty quickly. we expect in the first year to have over 100 new cars in service that be substantially relive congestion on the bart system. our plan is to keep the old cars operating as long as we can so that the new cars

become additive for a while until we have enough new cars, then we can begin to retire the old fleet. there is hope that in the near term, 3 or 4 years from now there should be substantial relief on the bart system. the next slide is entitled public outreach. it has a table that shows the attendance at the various events we held as well as the previous participation in the design process. i mentioned earlier we've had almost 35,000 can ustomers participate so far in the process. that would include sending us e-mails, is surveys, community meetings, going to one of the prototype side or mock ups and giving us input. it's been very helpful

to the design process. beyond the general public input, we've been repeating out -- reaching out to disability and senior organizations as well as community based organizations to attend the various events and have specific meetings with different groups that provide disability services or provide disability policy assessment. we've met at least 8 times with our bart accessibility task force and we've met with other organizations as well. next as i mentioned earlier i will be talking about different accessibility features on the new train cars. many of which came from public input or from our work with the bart accessibility task force. so first of all, this slide no. 5 talks about

accessibility features for individuals who are deaf or have a hearing impairment. well have dramatic improvements for people who are deaf or have a hearing impairment on the new train service. in the old cars we relied on a public address system that made it very difficult for people with hearing impairments to get the information they needed. the new cars will have modern communication systems including both interior and exterior digital displays. first of all on the interior, we will have six 27 627-inch lcd screens that will provide a range that i will explain in a minute. in addition we'll

have 2 led screens at the bulk head of the car above the end doors. we will have lcd screens that will focus on providing the next stop information. to describe in a little bit more detail the 6 d lcd screens they will be located adjacent to doors fairly high up on the wall to maximize sight lines and visibility. the screen is a very flexible programmable screen. in the current version of it which is really generation 1, we have planned three different zones on the screen. on the left side and a majority of the screen will be a dynamic system map. meaning it will be a live realtime

map of the bart system that will have a "you are here" bubble that shows the current location and that bubble will move as the train moves. we also have a luna -- line that the train is serving highlighted in a brighter color. the system map, the dynamic system map is designed to be what we call sort of a close up product. it's because it's a whole map and just part of a screen. it not something you will be able to see from 30 feet away. but we do have six of them on board and from a distance of 10-15 feet for someone with normal eyesight, it will be visible and for others, they may need to move a little bit closer. in addition to the dynamic map

in the upper right hand corner in much larger letters designed to be scene -- seen from a distance. this is the most featured requested information piece by our can ustomers and that will be very prominent on the screens. because it's the next stop, not the final stop and we need to be as clear as we can with the public what stop we are talking about, the word next will rotate in multiple languages in the standard languages that bart utilizes which are english, chinese, spanish, vietnamese and korean. in the bottom right hand segment of the screen we will rotate a variety of information. they will be courtesy message. the one shown on the slide here thanks

can ustomers for vacating seats for people and seniors with disabilities and that will be shown in that segment there. in addition to all of those interior screens which are new to the new trains, we will have exterior signs that will face to the outside of the train that show the line, the route that the train is on and it will have a block of color for those people that can see color to show them it's the blue line or the red line or some other line. another feature for those who have a hearing impairment that we are very proud of on the new train cars is we've committed to test an induction move system on the trains. we will try to make that system

work on the middle segments of the cars, the cars will have three doors and we plan to deploy this system at the 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.