>> >> >> >> >> city of san francisco >> >> okay. ooul >> >> welcome, everybody. this is the march meeting of the san francisco mayor's disability council. i am chip supanich, cochair of the council. now we'll tv introduction read by council member roland wong. >> good afternoon. happy first day of

spring. and welcome to the mayor's distribute council this friday march 20, 2015. in room 400 of san francisco city hall. city hall is an accessible to persons using wheelchairs and other assistive mobility devices. wheelchair access is provided at van ness street via ramps. wheelchair access at the pope street/carlton entrance is provided. wheelchair lift. assistive

listening devices are available and our meeting is close-captioned and sign language interpreted. our materials are available in large braille. please ask staff for any additional assistance. to prevent electronic interference with this room sound system and to respect everyone's ability to focus on the presentations, please silence all mobile phones and pda's. your cooperation is appreciated. we welcome the public's participation during public comment. you may complete a speaker card available in the front of the room or call our bridge

line at 1415-554-9632. >> let me repeat that. 1415-554-9632. where a staff person will handle request to speak. the mayor's disability council meeting is held the third friday of the month. our next regular meeting will be on april 17, 2015, from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. here at san francisco city hall in room 400. please call the mayor's office on disability for further information or request accommodations at

1415-554-6789 voice or 1415-554-6799 tty. a reminder to all of our guest today to speak slowly into their microphone to assist our captioner and interpreters. we thank you for joining us. >> thank you, council member wong. may we have the roll call, please. >> cochair supanich? >> present. >> council member kostanian, senhaux, harriet wong, present, council member roland wong? present. >> thank you. next we'll have the meeting -- reading of the agenda.

>> agenda item no. 1. welcome, introduction and roll call. agenda item no. 2. reading and approval of the agenda. agenda item no. 3. public comment. items not on today's agenda, but within the jurisdiction of the mdc. each speaker is limited to 3 minutes. agenda item no. 4. information item. report from cochair supanich. agenda item no. 5. information item. bay area rapid transit new fleet and other accessibility initiative bart representative. battery. public comment is welcome. agenda item no. 6. information item. an update on the development of the new affordable housing data portal.

sf dahlia, san francisco's data base for affordable housing listing, information and application. presentation by brian chiu director of community development, mayor's on housing and community development, teresa, director of housing development, michael solomon. lara sallee affordable housing data portal coordinator, sf aids foundation. 92 break. the council will take a 10-minute break. agenda item no. 7. overview of aids legal referral panel. a

presentation of services that alrp provides to people with hiv and aids. pensacola comment is welcome. >> agenda item no. 8. cochair elections. agenda item no. 9. report from the director of mayor's office on disability. 92 agenda item no. 10. report from the disability disaster preparedness committee. >> agenda item no. 11. public comment. items not on today's agenda but one the jurisdiction of mdc. each speaker is limited to 3 minutes. agenda item no. 12 correspondence. agenda item no. there. council member comments and announcements. no. 14. adjourn in memory of

derek zarda. >> next we have public comment. is there anyone wanting to speak? yes, bill? >> i just want to make sure that everybody knows about the upcoming ada celebration. carla has done a lot of work to get this event rolling. i just want to make sure this is put in their calendars wednesday on july 1st, it will be at city hall. there will be food and entertainment as well as a program. so please, we look forward to everybody celebrating the 25th year of the americans with disabilities act. >> thank you. if you would like to speak, please fill out a card. thank

you. when making public comments, we ask you to do the following. please be respectful to our presenters, do not ask questions directly to the presenters and please stay within the minutes. agenda item no. 4. report from me. recently i met with cochairs of other disability councils and commissions in the bay area. and we had about an hour-and-a-half to 2-hour meeting. it was half getting to know one another and half exploring ways to collaborating around ab 25. we looked at various things we might do and spent a good deal of time about future 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