ways to collaborate beyond ada 25 and i was very encouraged by the spirit of the meeting and the willingness of people to cooperate in the future. we will be meeting general at the end of april, date yet to be determined, but we will be moving forward with plans for collaboration as a regional group. i'm very encouraged by this. that's my report. agenda item no. 5 is the bay area rapport transit new fleet and other accessibility initiatives. mr. franklin? >> thank you very much council members for giving bart the opportunity to address you. my name is bob franklin. i'm not sure how i control this.

>> my name is bob franklin, the department manager for customer access for bart. my contact number is listed. any other phone number. 510-464. 4343. -- 6133. if you have any questions, you can contact me for any questions you may have. my contact information is also listed on bart's website. the main reason we are here today is to

provide fleet update. since we've come before with information publically about the layout of the enter -- interior car configuration. we recently had a change. here is a picture of an old fleet and we also have a larger diagram that's useful for any of the council members or people in the audience. this diagram is distorted to comply with the captioning services. but basically the previous layout has a wheelchair. there is three doors in the new bart train compared to two at our current fleet. the previous design had

wheelchair designated area in doors 1 and 3 and end doors on each train. and there is also a pole in the center of each vehicle vestibule. that was the purpose of that pole was to provide people with other types of disabilities that needed some sitting if you are caught in the middle of the doorway and you are unsteady for whatever reason. it gives you the ability to grab onto the train as it accelerates and desell rates. this design was a pathway with 49 inch clearance around the offset pole. the picture illustrated here at the third doorway there is a yellow path of travel from the doorway to the wheelchair area which is 49

inches across. so there was some concerns about this namely three. there was the impact of the pole to the path of travel. if you were traveling in a wheelchair and you are entering a vehicle and it's crowded which bart trains often are it becomes problematic to navigate around a pole especially when people are there and they are not giving up their position. so if that interrupted and made it difficult for passengers using wheelchairs. there is place for designated wheelchairs of the cars with one area per end made it harder for groups traveling with bhoer than one wheelchair to travel together. they would have to split up. also for the

blind and -- sight impaired travelers. we have a mixed fleet with old and new cars. the old cars do not have any poles to the vestibule area, the new cars do. if you are blind, there may or may not be a pole in front of you. this pole starts out as one pole from the bottom and branches into three different parts so it's easier for more than one person to grab onto it. if you are traveling with a service animal, they may reach out to poles and it could clip a shoulder with a person traveling with a service animal. here is a picture of the new

car configuration. it basically shows the door entrance and you can see right to the right of the door it's embedded in the floor is a wheelchair icon to further confirm that this area is designated for passengers travel with a wheelchair. there is a pole that branches out into three poles at about midway through the pole between the floor and the ceiling. there is decals on these poles, if you are sight impaired, it called attention that there is a pole in front of you. we begin to have conversations throughout this process with various disability groups and they begin to express concerns about this pole. some of these are the bart accessibility task

force which council member roland wong also serves on that, thank you for your service on that and also independent living resource center of san francisco, the center for independent living, san francisco's mayor commission on disabilities and community resource for independent living. we conducted a survey on the pole -- and unfortunately for the close captioning i didn't provide this. there is a rating on the pole. many people felt the pole helped them that had mental or cognitive vision or low hearing and they rated the pole good or excellent. people that were travel with a wheelchair or blind felt the

pole was poor in the majority of cases. so this slide depicts there is diverse needs and different responses by disability. the next slide depicts the new configuration after hearing complaints and issues about the poland this is an exaggerated slide also so we had room for the captioning. i brought a larger depiction of it as well, if anybody cares to see that. thank you, carla. we also have a braille map if anybody would like to see this. this gives a tactile version of where the seats and poles are for this

configuration. basically what this is a big change is it's relocating wheelchair designated areas from the two doors, doors one and three into two areas into center door and removing the center pole. so this was a dra, a sponsored initiative that the bart board voted on a couple weeks ago and it made these changes to this car configuration. so the advantage is of this are they allow groups travel with more passenger in a wheelchair to stay together. it also removed that pole from the wheelchair designated area as well as isolating the bike areas to the first door so it keeps bikes away from passengers using wheelchairs. there is two pictures depicted here. one is the cab

car with a train operator, operates the train and the other is just a little bit more room because we don't have that cab area. again the benefits of this new proposal to allow passengers with more than one wheelchair to be closer together. they will find the wheelchair area to the right as they board from all platforms, no matter if it's the center boarding platform or sideboarding platform. as you enter the door it will always be at the center door of each car. it retains the tripod pole -- and each indoor for semi ambulatory people who may need

to hold onto as the train accelerates. it's sometimes hard to get situated and it jerks forward and sometimes people need that extra immediate grab. this keeps the same number of seats and wheelchair areas and retained a 50% increase in senior disabled reading it currently has. right now as you enter any door on currently to your left is a seat and to the right is the open area. this next slide shows the number of organizations that supported this new initiative. i will read them. the disability rights advocates. the california foundation for independent living centers, the independent living resource center of san francisco, community resources for

independent living and enrollment bart accessibility task force. there are other accessible features that the conversation has been dominated by the discussion of the pole. but there are other new features for this new fleet that is beneficial as well. for persons with hearing impairment, if there is a gap between cars and you are using a cane to detect an opening that you think is a doorway, but there is not a floor, there is the figures that protrude from the cars that prevent people from walking through. so if you are feeling

up above for whether or not to enter that you think is a door, you will find that it is an inner car barrier. unfortunately we have had people not check the floor and have gone off our platform. to address that, we have on our platform we have tactile different tactile tiles to convey different information. at the four center doors on all the platforms except sfo and i will explain that in a second. we have a truncated along the pathways and there are center bars that indicate the door opening in all cases. so some of our trains, only three cars. if you go and they stop in the middle in 99% of the cases the middle of the platform is if it train control is automatic. if the train control is not

automatic it will pull to the edge of the platform so the operator doesn't get confused with the cars hanging off the back of the platform. to prevent that we have marked directional bars which is currently a 1 foot by 4 foot -foot surface to guarantee when you will get a door opening. we've also automated announcements with a better pa system. it will be a clearer system with more disbursed speakers. as well as i mentioned early whier there is decals on the pole to improve contrast for people with sight impairments. for customers with hearing impairments we have exterior and digital displays so you will know which train stop you are pulling into. right now we just have an audio announcement. it let's you know where the bart

station, i have been at bart for 17 years and i'm still learning how to differentiate station especially at night. a visual display will help passengers with hearing impairment. we have conducted a test at the station with the platform. although i don't have a hearing impairment i was able to test it with a head set and we were having construction at the time with jack hammers and i could not hear the announcements that were being made, what train was pulling in and what station announcements, and with the hearing induction, it was crystal clear. i did not want to take off my head set. we had about 30 people test it out and people really loved it. we had it tested out at the booth and we are also beginning to play and

roll this out. for customers with mobility impairment we will have a 50% increase in priority seating and seating will be in different colors. the seats will be green versus the seats being blue to call attention that this is a special seat or it's a different seat for people that may not be paying attention. the seats are higher off the ground to make it easier to sit up and stand down and seats in the area of emergency evacuation. they are at the end of each cab. we are going to relocate them to buy the doors. if you have an issue that you want to communicate with the train operator before you are going to go through a very narrow aisle and a car full of people and now it will be more

convenient to access. and it's also indicated with full marking so wheelchair areas, the further to call people's attention that this is a priority area identified for wheelchair users. right now we have a bulge coming out. that prevents, it restricts access to that area and that will be removed as well. the next slide shows two pictures. one is priority seating by the doors. it shows a brighter color. it also shows a pole from the seat closest to the door between the door and a pole coming from the

bottom. there is still a pole for people to grab onto if they need that extra access, extra support. the picture on the right is the intent to show additional of hand grabs. so in this area where a lot of people can gather, there is no where for them to hold onto, we have added additional hand grabs. we have currently some hand grabs on the cars and we've added bars between this area to cover additional grabs. that completes the update. i wanted to call your attention to other initiatives that bart is pursuing. we have a bart accessibility task force that meets thursday at 2:00 p.m.. the public is welcome to attend. we

do have two openings currently on the committee. so if you are willing to participate we would love to have your point of view. even if you don't want to be a member, you are welcome. it's open to the public. we have bart board meetings usually the second and fourth thursday of each month in downtown oakland by the 19th street bart station. just check bart .gov to confirm there is a meeting if you want to come. i alluded to some new tactile features on the platform, there is the yellow truncated domes and black truncated domes where the door

ways are. we have made some changes to this. the truncated dome will be wider pursuant to the california building code. we've (teddy -- tested it out a lot. we are in the station right now. it will be useful in my opinion to passengers travel by wheelchair. there is also always a conflict to providing between a pathway for blind users and wheelchair users that have to divert across this. there is a wider space between the dots and we are also making it all yellow. right now there is black. so the purpose behind that is to comply with ada federal and state standards, but we will be marking the door ways in other ways. so people will know where to lineup with the sticker. we are still trying that out. we want

to present first and foremost a color contrast. that's the intent, a visual and tactile contrast for safety purposes for people with sight impairment for that strip. even though black, people like it to know where to lineup, it's not for their convenience and we will communicate that in another way. we are also expanding the directional bars. right now it's 1 foot by four 4-foot, we are making it 3-foot by 4-foot. because usually people are lined up in front. if you are sweeping with a cane, you may miss that. so it's a bigger matt. at the four center door locations. we also have detectable pathways for blind users. bart usually tries things

and to be honest we usually get it wrong but in practice we learn. for this particular example we start out with a 24-inch pathway and now it's too big, passengers using wheelchairs will complain. it's a pretty long way to traverse an across. now it's 12 inches and now to 6 inches and just as effective for our intend audience and less intrusive for those traveling with leading -- luggage and wheelchairs. we have expanded our user trial groups. we are sending out invites to welcome everyone to participate. i would invite this group. i will send

an invitation to donna. to show where the platforms show where the door centers are and we put a mock trial and people didn't like it. it was too much clutter and when the consequences are misinterpreting the signs and falling onto a track, we can't take that chance. we are exploring different solutions to let people know how to get to the doors or which direction to go to. how am i doing on time? each year bart receives $4 million in budget for transit. many uses it to operate bart chooses not to and instead for disability initiatives. this is

to address the latest codes or make some improvements. for example recently we up grated our fire alarms which is just a sounding fire alarm to a flashing fire alarm so if you are deaf or hard of hearing you are alerted that something is going wrong also. we are also working to try out a video relay system for deaf passengers so it's basically skype with an asl interpreter so if a passenger needs to communicate with a station agent and needs assistance, this is something we are trying to do. we are also making some improvements to closing the timing of the elevator closing and opening. we are also, i'm going to be replacing the floors of all the elevators. right now unfortunately they are used for other purposes besides

transportation. it's an isolated, an area where people can be by themselves and people have used it for unfortunately for restroom purposes. the smell, we can't clean it out. unfortunately it's people's only access to bart. so what we are doing now is we are making this industrial bathtub where it contains all liquids. it will be easier to clean and won't seep down or corrode or warp. i think we had some duct tape on the floor of the elevator. this won't wear out on the at least anytime soon. lastly, this is an invitation to anyone. we would like to try out thing. so we use a small portion of this money to try out things. like i said, when we first try, whatever we do initially is usually we

learn from it. so this is just some small test. for example we've recently tested a step here. it's technology. blue tooth activated speaker that when you get within 40 feet of it, it starts sounding off. we can use this for blind passengers if they want to know where a station agent booth is or where an elevator is. this is one example of technology that we are pursuing. as well as imagine if you are blind and your path of travel is now interrupted because of who knows, something has gone wrong or bart is making a change then we can deploy technology such as this to divert people to another stairway or elevator. we do have april 1st, a track

and trade program for people with mobility impairment. from 10:00 a.m. to noon. we will bring an out of service train for passengers to explore. if you don't know where the speaker is to contact the station agent. if you don't know where the seats are because usually when you get on its too crowded or you are afraid to enter the bart system because you don't know about it, we are going to bring a train to explore and the station agents and letting them know various safety features of the bart system including where the the safe area is on the track way. if for example you were to fall on the track way, there is an area underneath the platform so that will be where you go. people will be allowed and the whole department will help people

explore this area. this is for the public. you are welcome to attend. we'll also be having other group representative preparing wheelchairs for making it easier to tie down and wheelchairs riders to make configurations for wheelchair users and having some table events. lastly we are working to host a technology conference. right now people are using their smartphones or apps. we want to tap into applications that people are using right now and see how we can apply it to bart to make it more accessible. if you are using a speech to text or if you have hearing, maybe you can go to a designated speaker so it translates for deaf passengers. or, we are also looking at indoor

navigation system like indoors. but sfo where you can be directed. it's 30 feet wide. so we can't have the features that sf 0 has but the key features. that's it for my presentation. i'm happy to answer any questions you may have. >> thank you. i would like to start with council member roland wong. >> thank you, mr. franklin. i have two comments. one of them is when we deploy the first phase of the new bart cars, i think it may get very confusing

when you have two older existing cars with two doors and the new cars with three doors. i can't really picture how people can actually navigate to figure out which door and you know even with signage, announcements, it's very hard to picture that. so, i know we brought it up at the task force the bart accessibility task force. i'm still really confused at how we are going to manage that or bart will manage that. the second one, i attended the