by Alice Richhart and Ron Brooks
If you’ve ever been to just about any local, state, or national meeting where ACB people have gathered to talk about issues that are important to us, you have almost certainly talked about the problem of transportation. Whether you live in the suburbs and need to get to work, or you wake up in the country and need to get to the nearest town for groceries, it doesn’t matter: Accessing transportation is a daily dilemma. It’s either not available, or using it is almost more trouble than it’s worth.
While we all agree that transportation needs to be improved, it’s hard to know where to begin or how to proceed. Some members feel strongly that blind and visually impaired people should ride regular buses and trains. Others feel that we should have on-demand access to paratransit. Still others live in towns with no public transit at all, and they have to rely on family and friends to even leave their homes. At the same time, public funds for transportation are shrinking, and transit systems are cutting the frequency of bus and rail services and tightening the rules governing programs like paratransit and subsidized taxicabs.
With these difficulties in mind, and given that transportation isn’t going to be getting a lot better or easier to use any time in the foreseeable future, ACB’s president, Chris Gray, has created an ad hoc task force to delve into transportation issues and to develop some recommendations concerning how ACB can best support affiliates and members with transportation concerns.
As the newly appointed co-chairs for the ACB Transportation Task Force, we want to tell you about our group and the tasks at hand. The members of our task force bring a diversity of experiences in advocating for good transportation in various communities and settings across the country. In addition to the two of us, the task force includes: Donna Smith of Virginia, Earlene Hughes of Indiana, Gayle Krause of Florida, Lynne Koral of Alaska and Ray Campbell of Illinois. This group represents all geographic areas of the country and a variety of community settings, ranging from large urban areas with relatively good public transit to the Alaskan frontier. We think this blend of experience will help us to avoid coming up with only one set of solutions that can work for people living in only one type of community.
We also want to tell you what you can expect of ACB’s Transportation Task Force. We will be conducting a survey of ACB members to determine your feelings about, needs for and uses of transportation. Once the results from this survey are tallied, we will begin discussing what kinds of positions our members want ACB to take with regard to a number of transportation issues. We will review our preliminary findings and recommendations with attendees at the ACB mid-year meeting to get feedback and recommendations. Based on this feedback, we will finalize our recommendations for resolutions to be discussed and adopted at the ACB national convention. At the convention, we also plan to sponsor a workshop on transportation advocacy, which will be designed to give participants a more thorough understanding of legal, political and procedural issues surrounding how transportation decisions are made. Our hope is that this workshop will assist ACB members in advocating more effectively for transportation improvements in their states and local communities.
We invite readers to send us your thoughts and suggestions regarding how transportation could be improved for blind and visually impaired people. We will use these suggestions as food for thought as we conduct our work. You can reach Alice Richhart at (912) 261-9833 or [email protected]. You can reach Ron Brooks at (505) 268-1485 or via e-mail, [email protected].
We look forward to all of these tasks with optimism that one day, you may be attending meetings of blindness groups where the subject of inadequate transportation doesn’t even need to come up.