Accessibility NYC Meetup Recap: Understanding Transportation Challenges for People With Disabilities in NYC

Great. Well, hello, everyone, welcome to our Meetup for accessibility New York City tonight. This is our June meetup. Excited to have our presentation tonight. I wanted to start off by thanking our sponsors. Thoughtbot, you're in the lovely office. Tyson in the back, Thoughtbot, and they are our event host and space, and we're appreciative to have our monthly meetup here.

We've also got Level Access that sponsors the realtime captions we have being displayed here. And we always graciously appreciate their support each month. Joly McFie from the Internet Society of New York, and we are broadcasting on YouTube all of our events. If you're unable to come in person, every meetup is live streamed with the live captions displayed, as well. Very excited for our topic tonight. You know, I actually live in Williamsburg, so I'm someone understanding transportation challenges, just from my perspective. Obviously, we have lots of perspectives, lots of things to think about. This is one of the most important things in New York City to be considering.

Really happy to have Jessica Murray here today to present to us about her research and understanding of what we're facing in New York City. Thanks.

Thank you. Thanks, Thomas. This is my favorite meetup in the city. I just have to say, it's probably the only meetup I attend regularly.

Sol I'm really super excited to be here. And thank you all for coming tonight. So I'm a student at the graduate center. I'm in my fourth year of a Ph.D. program is there in developmental psychology. And I'm still learning about all of the transportation challenges that people with disabilities face when they're trying to get around the city.

And I'm learning a lot about different types of disabilities besides just wheelchair access. So tonight, I'm going to tell you kind of what I've learned so far and some of my research up until this point. I'm also working on my dissertation proposal this summer. So this is actually a really great opportunity for me to get feedback from you to kind of help develop my research ideas for my dissertation. I'm also the cochair of the Community Disability Scholars Network. This is kind of like an informal network of professors at all of the campuses. And we meet once a semester and try to foster disability studies. And being involved in this group has really kind of expanded my awareness of disability issues. And I'm also an advocate for making transportation more accessible. This is my, probably my most favorite design that I've

ever made. And I'll talk more about advocacy later at the end of the presentation. Some of my fellow advocates are in the room. So thank you all for coming tonight.

So I'm going to give you a little bit of my background. I don't want to make this whole thing about me. But I think having a little context of where I'm coming from is useful because people tend to ask why I'm interested in this topic. And so, the part of the story is that I grew up in Texas, which is very different than New York.

I grew up outside of Dallas in a semirural area. So as a child, I kind of had limited mobility. I was driven around everywhere. I could walk and take a bicycle to some extent.

But for the most part, I was very auto dependent even as a child. And of course, when I grew up and turned 16, I got my driver's license like everyone else. And I hated driving. I absolutely hated it. It was just not really a favorite thing for me. I don't like being next to aggressive drivers on the highway. I did not like being stuck in a car driving around Texas. And so, when I went off to college at UT Austin, I gave up my car and I was excited to take a bus and get around.

And I could do that to some extent. I had help from friends in Austin because you can't get everywhere with the bus. And as part of my when I was in school, I received a travel scholarship and got to go to Switzerland and saw their amazing transit system and fell in love with public transportation. So I was, you know, what the kids now are calling a transitoriented teen. I don't know if anyone has seen that meme. I fell in love with it. I had a brief period designing materials for a bus route that would be for tourists visiting Austin. And I would hope it would turn into a career there, but that didn't really work out, I moved back to Dallas, bought a car, worked there for about five years, became a design jack of all trades, learned a lot of different graphic design skills.

Finally got fed up with driving and then, moved to New York. So that was about ten years ago that I moved. And I worked here in New York City for about five years. Before I decided to go back to school. And part of what prompted my return to school, and actually, my return or my move to New York City was becoming diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. So in 2005, I had my first, kind of major symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and half of my body went numb on the left side. I couldn't feel the sensation of my skin. I didn't know what was happening. I saw a doctor and he said, you know, we have to do some tests to see if this is what you have, but, maybe you

should sit down at my computer and read what multiple sclerosis is. And he left me in his office for about 20 minutes so I could read. All about everything that could possibly happen to me now that I may have MS. And he said, you know, you should wait and see, it'll go away. This is different for everyone. But if it happens, again, go see a doctor, get an MRI, get more tests and then, get diagnosed. It went away. In 2008, it came back and I had my second kind of major relapse. So I got officially diagnosed and decided what am I doing with my life? And, you know, kind of up and moved to New York about six months later. After I got here, I had another major relapse, and that prompted me to go

back to school. I was working in marketing, but I was not very fulfilled or satisfied and I wanted to make a change in the world. So I applied for the environmental psychology Ph.D. program. I got denied. I applied for the master's program and got accepted. And I did a master's there first and then applied for a different psychology program and that's where I'm at now. I'm going to show a short video I made in my very first class. This was a class called Supportive Settings and Restorative Environments.

And I had to convince my professor that the subway was a supportive and restorative environment. It took convincing. I edited this video down from the full tenminute presentation. So if there's some weird edits or jumps between ideas, that's why. I cut out about six minutes, and I won't subject you to the whole presentation. Can you hear that?

In 2008, I sold it for $4,000 and moved to New York City. I never felt so free. Can you hear it? The city was exhausting. The size and density was mind blowing. I moved back, again, in 2008. The subway provides down time between work and life activities allowing for introspection and engagement For people and media. And does it safely.

The subway also provides physical health benefits. Time spent driving is related to higher levels of obesity. Walking just a mile a day to get around the city adds up to ten marathons a year. Overall, New Yorkers enjoy a twoyearlonger life expectancy than the national average.

The transit authority has been integrating art into the architecture of the subway for over 25 years now and has brought a sense of place to the individual stations. The beauty of the permanent art is that it preserves the original feeling of the subway while incorporating the details of the city above. Permanent and temporary artworks have brought the healing power of art into a distressed place and changed it for the better. 27 years after the transit program, the subway has become a destination. Supporting not only the 8 million residents and visitors, but a rich cultural underground. It's become its own institution. "New York Times" author Randy Kennedy calls it the most underrated art program in New York City. The social landscape can be fraught with isolation.

Overtime, aggression from other drivers becomes the only interaction you have with people on the road. I haven't been flipped off by anyone in the four years I've ridden the subway. While a commute on the subway can become routine, there's more than a good chance you'll encounter something new every day. There's stimulation lacking from driving that comes from social contact with strangers. Observing the differences, making eye contact, overhearing conversations and sometimes, even having a conversation. Even if it is just to give directions. The subway for me is an escape from an even more taxing environment. And an escape to any number of destinations in the city. The subway has evolved into a series of niche environments.

Social contact in this context can bring more restoration than we realize. An obvious flaw of the subway is the lack of accessibility. While it's making progress, today only a quarter of stations are ADA compliant. The original builders of the subway imagine a sophisticated place that would make commuting seem dignified. Over the years, the MTA has made improvements to cars to make them comfortable and durable, letting the system falling into a state of disrepair has had negative effects. The subway could use work, it still gets good reception from those who rely on its support. Even necessary trips can surprise and offer restoration from unexpected sources. I for one will continue to look forward to my next trip.

Okay. So, yeah, that was kind of me at the beginning of my graduate school experience. So I went on to write this thesis, work life experiences for people with mobility disabilities in New York City. And that part about the subway not being accessible stuck in my head. I don't know if anyone is familiar with the work, but she writes about disability languages and she had a big influence on my research after that point. So for my thesis, I interviewed about ten people, most of which were wheelchair users in New York City. And I conducted about ten hours worth of interviews. And, you know, kind of tried to understand all of the various things in their lives that were impacted by their disability.

And so, my kind of guiding framework was this developmental psychologist. And he had this idea of ecological systems idea where we're kind of in the middle of all of these different systems and even something that's kind of outside of our immediate world can impact our daily lives pretty profoundly. He had really boring concentric circle design. And I designed this, like, much more complicated diagram, you know, with all of the, microsystems, kind of, like, your individual environments, you know, we travel from place to place. Our home is probably our most important microenvironment. There's home and school, work, you know, health and care had a big part of people with disabilities lives. And then, there are other kind of characters in there that also influence, like, their daytoday life. Maybe a personal care attendant,

that person can affect their lives from daytoday. And I think the interest for me was kind of looking at how these local and federal policies actually really impact how people are able to live their lives. And transportation was one thing that came up that was extremely important and sensitive topic to most of the people that I interviewed. I think it was probably, like, the most important part of their lives, or it took up a lot of their energy because of the many issues that they encountered just trying to get around.

And so, that, you know, has all of these other effects on how to obtain education and get a job. The first paper I published came from these interviews. And it was looking specifically at Accessiride. Hearing the stories of the transportation challenges was enough to let me know that, yes, I'm on the right track. Transportation is something I should continue to study. But hearing Accessiride stories where out of the park with the kinds of challenges and difficulties and horror stories and just so much emotion involved in this process of just trying to get from place to place. So I took the very small number of Accessiride narratives. There were about five of them. And I did a deep analysis of the narratives and also looked at the MTA's policies and the Americans with Disabilities Act.

The type of analysis I used, this is all qualitative research is called Narrative Analysis, and I did three different types. The first one was a Plot Analysis, using the user stories. Value analysis looking at the policy documents and how the values play out in people's daily lives and a systems analysis, which I'll explain a little bit more. So plot analysis is basically based on the idea that we communicate in stories. And so, even an everyday conversation where we're telling each other stories, something happened today, I want to tell you what happened. There's usually something that starts the story. If, you know, it's a polished story, there's kind of things that complicate and lead up to this high point. And then, it kind of gets resolved and then, there's an end to the story.

In conversation, these stories are not nearly this neat. So sometimes, the complicated resolutions and strategies are in different places. It's a lot of work to go through and identify which ones are which. And you have to get another researcher to verify you're seeing the same thing. For the high points, I there were 25 narratives and 25 high points.

And the most common ones were, you know, people expressing anxiety and frustration. And then, the second most common ones were, you know, kind of, just saying it is what it is and this is the choice I have. Or choosing, like, a different mode of transportation. Complications and resolutions, I also categorized those. And the types of complications were that, you know, for a lot of people, accessiride was literally their only choice and the alternative was much worse. If it took two hours to get someone somewhere, the bus and the subway and the unknowns would it could take longer and there could be this risk of getting stuck in a subway station or not being picked up by the bus because it's full and having to wait half an hour for the next bus. That was the worst the most frequent type

of complication. But people are resilient and, you know, their resolution strategies were proactive. They would go out of their way to try to fix the problem. But there were about twice as many complications as resolutions. So for the values analysis, there's kind of two different types of values that you can find in people's statements. You have the explicit values where people are pretty much putting out there what they think, you know.

This is an example from the MTA's pair transit, you know, kind of guideline, FAQs. They're saying, you will not be reimbursed for a taxi or car service if we determine you're responsible for the problem. It's pretty straightforward and direct and conveying their values pretty clearly. And then, there's implicit values where there's, you know, kind of have to read between the lines. This is another example from the MTA pickup time in quotation marks is the time you wish AR to arrive.

And that's almost like a little bit, I don't know how to describe that. It's a little bit like they're saying, oh, we know that we're never going to get there on time. So we'll just, like, make light of it and, you know, that's kind over, like, this kind of implicit thing they're saying. So for the three narratives that I used for the values analysis, you know, there's the section in the ADA that describes what it is and what's required. And then, the MTA has a page about Accessiride, and what to do if the vehicle is late. And I chose one representative user narrative that kind of neatly encompassed what a lot of other people had been saying.

Yes?

What's the amount of time that's considered late under that?

Oh, that's half an hour. Oh, I'm sorry, Thomas is asking, what is the amount of time that a driver can be late where it's considered late? So they have to be more than 30 minutes late for it to be considered late. And then, their official policy is you're not supposed to even call until it's been half an hour past your pickup time. As you can imagine, that's pretty frustrating for people. I basically found about six values that were shared among some or all of the narratives. Basically, came down to people with disabilities having rights, denying service as discrimination. MTA is responsible for providing as far as to people with disabilities as a public entity. Paired transit is expensive. It's not really a value that we would necessarily hold close, but it's something that came up in the MTA policies a lot.

Also, the paired transit exists in the real world. So problems are going to happen. And that individuals are ultimately responsible for their own mobility. So you can kind of see where some of the values are missing. And then, for the systems analysis, it's a close reading to understand the characters and settings and these different kind of systems.

You look at characters for microsystems, it's kind of family members, maybe your personal care attendant, your friends, doctor, et cetera. The Meso system, I don't think I explained, but it's an interaction between microsystems. For instance, your partner has a terrible boss at work. And he brings that back home with you. So that's part of this meso system that impacts your life. And for exo systems, this is a third party characters with limited contact with the person. And for macro, it's kind of like larger institutions lawmakers, decisionmakers, stuff like that. A couple of examples for complications and resolutions, you know, for micro, it could be I was afraid to take public transportation.

And then, if they try to resolve that. Well, you know, what can I do? I try to relax if I'm on Accessiride and it's bumpy, that's all I can do to resolve it. They'll take you the long way. So this is moving between the microsystems, again. And people resolve that by kind of adding more time to their pickup time so they don't lose their appointment of where they're going. Another example complication for the exosystem, would be this other person who is not really in your immediate environment: He's supposed to pick me up, but he's in queens. What am I supposed to do now? They are supposed to organize another pickup for me. And for macro, it's looking at, like, society at large. I think other cities would be worse because everything's so far away. Or they

would be better off putting money into improving the subway, it could be a resolution for the macro level. When I kind of combine these and compare them all together, basically, I saw this pattern of problems kind of originating outside of the micro level, but then being resolved on the micro level. There's a lot of unresolved issues in the narratives. And for the most part, it's people internalizing frustrations and kind of living with the stress that comes with trying to get around. And then, when you kind of look at the values analysis using the same ecological systems framework, you see that the users is more focused on their micro needs. But they can see the whole picture, the exo and the macro whereas the MTA has kind of lost a little bit of touch with the macro, the big picture of rights and not discriminating

against people. And the ADA's a little bit more balanced, but with a little bit less attention paid to the individual. So, yeah, taking looking at some of these complications and some of these values, you can kind of make policy recommendations based on what the most frequent complications are. And it's not really that difficult to kind of come up with some ideas to alleviate some of the issues that people are experiencing.

So I'm not going to go through each one of those policy recommendations, but yeah, so, you can find that paper online, if you want to read the whole thing, email me and I'd be happy to share it with you. That kind of brings me to the current research project that I've been working on. This kind of represents like a little bit of a shift in focus, trying to go from, like well, first of all, qualitative analysis is tedious and hard.

And it's kind of have been taking a lot of statistics courses and kind of interested in big data and, like, yeah, GPS data, was looking at these kind of travel studies that I thought were interesting. But searching for a data set out there that would have some variables dealing with disability and you'd be shocked to find how few there are national travel surveys, even regional travel surveys that don't even ask the question as a demographic variable. Or if they do ask it, it's like, do you have a disability? Yes or no? Well, that's not really that useful because, you know, as we all know, disability is so varied. So this also kind of coincided with this kind of broadening interest in different types of disabilities. I was involved with a disability

coloquium. And one of the chairs, he was totally blind and this really brilliant, kind of hackertype person. He's basically figured out how to get his hands on any kind of information he wants from a young age. He teaches people how to do other blind people how to do Arduino. Really the kind of first totally blind person I've interacted with on that level. And so, we kind over chatted about a number of accessibility things. And so, the panel was about kind of trying to theorize access and how we can move it forward. And so we talked about kind of a culture of accessibility and creating awareness and understanding around culture at large. Also, being a specialist versus a generalist. I'd been focusing on mobility, disability, pretty much for most of my research, it's easy to understand, it was easy for me to empathize with because

of my own experience with MS. It's easy to see where the problems are and the frustrations are. But there's all of these other accessibility problems that have not even gotten any attention like, for instance, there's not public address systems. And half of our subway stations any blind passengers I'm sorry, deaf passengers no blind passengers trying to use the subway, I don't know what I'm trying to say, the information is not getting to people. We're not really presenting the important information that people need in multiple formats. So there's a lot of issues that are kind of under the surface that have never been addressed. Some other motivations for the project are, you know, like I said, this isn't really given much consideration in general transportation studies. I know about these that moods can kind of spill over from family and work environments

that we don't really know much about how transportation effects our moods. GPS technology offers a lot of potential for collecting data and for awareness of mobility patterns. A lot of studies use proprietary and expensive software. So if you wanted to do a study where you're collecting GPS data, you can either develop your own app or buy an app or rent it to use. But most of those are not cost effective, especially for someone who is attending a public university. And a lot of the data sets that I was able to find, they're used for planning purposes. They don't collect qualitative data and don't ask questions are interesting. Mobility.org is basically trying to use free tools that are already out there. That people have already developed, that people are somewhat familiar with. So I'm using Google Maps timeline, and Paco,

which is a qualitative personal analytics companion. Anyone can download and create their own experiments with this app. And I'm kind of drawing on this idea of, like, the quantified self or citizen science where people are trying to collect their own data about their own behaviors. And analyze their own data.

But they don't really have a lot of tools to look at this kind of data. But Google Maps timeline offers a little bit of that. Back in March, I conducted a pilot or feasibility study. My main research question was it possible to collect high quality data and using only free tools? And so, some of my other questions were that I was developing this process and trying to make it easy to use and understand for a lot of people and also, to identify accessibility issues. A couple of other questions, what is the ideal frequency of entries? I gave a choice for one time a day survey or three times a day? The onetime had same questions, just asked what times of day did you travel? And they would have the same set of questions for each time they answered.

I also wanted to see if I could get some rich data. So range of experiences travel challenges and emotions. Then to see if providing people with reporting their mobility would encourage them to participate. So I spent a lot of time developing the website and used tools I learned here. Using the website to understand. Hemingwayapp.com, which will tell you what grade level you're writing at. And when I decided to take another look at my website, I realized I was writing at a 16th grade reading level. I think if you spend too much time in academia, you kind of start to write in this inaccessible way. And I was trying to add more information to make it more understandable. But I realized what I needed to do was take more information to make it understandable. I started out with

a page, a website that had five or six different pages. I condensed it all into one page with a couple of other pages for additional resources and shortened everything to be about a thousand words. Basically, this was the flow chart for the study. I had about 375 people visit the site in two weeks. 67 people filled out the screening form. I was looking for 20 participants. 58 filled out the demographic survey. And then, I selected 20 based on that. And I oversampled people with disabilities just to get their insights. But this is something I'm going to be doing going forward, too, when I do a fuller study. The steps were once they were selected, they would install Google Maps and, you know, turn on their location history and edit their timeline if something came up and

was incorrect. And then, they would do this survey, this Paco survey once or three times a day. After that data collection was complete, I created a very basic mobility report for them and followed up with the focus group and followup survey. So this was kind of the screening and selection process. It was basically 18 and older, New York City metro area resident with a smartphone and computer with internet. I asked them questions, basic demographic questions.

Disability questions, and a few transportation questions. So these are some screenshots of what Google Maps timeline looks like. If you enable your location history, you can start checking your history. And you're the only person that can see it. And if you want to share it with someone, you can download a file for each day.

The nice thing is that you can edit the modes of transportation. So it's actually you get pretty good data back out of it and this interface is really well designed and they've put a lot of money into it. And then, this these screenshots are from the PACO app. Basically, the questions that I was asking besides the kind of what mode of transportation were you using? What was the purpose of your trip? Who were you traveling with? I also wanted to specifically ask about obstacles and challenges.

And there's room for openended questions about, you know, what kinds of obstacles did they encounter? How did they deal with it? How did they feel after their trip? Why did they feel that way? And then, you know, a space for memorable experiences. And this is kind of just a brief overview of the mobility report. So we would show a map of all of their travel within the week and some charts that showed their mood fluctuations, depending on mode of transportation, companion, et cetera.

So for the feasibility study, these were some of the kind of questions I was looking for. And I think I did pretty well on making things easy to understand and use. Luckily, the tools are well designed and most people had an easy time using most of the tools. A few people, I gave them the option of me creating a Gmail account for them so I could download the files. So that's why the orange "not applicable" is on the kml files. But for the most part, I think it was successful on that front.

As far as data completion, this was a whole week of data for doing surveys either once a day, three times a day and, also, downloading and saving the Google Maps data. So also, pretty good. I was happy with the results.

Three times a day?

Mind handing the mic over?

Is it on?

Trying. Okay. So just looking at this, it looks like the three times a day was completed more than one time a day?

Yes. So this is how many people completed each step, at least seven days or fewer than seven days. So around 83% completed at least a week of the three times a day survey. So yeah. Not bad. And then, this is kind of shows the data quality. So the total trip entries for the one time a day versus the three times a day. Well, the one time a day survey, people reported more trips but, you know, the descriptive and memorable experience entries were a lot higher for the three times a day. Yeah. I think it's kind of, like, I get better quality with the three times a day survey, but I get better, more complete data. But I think since I have to have maps data and the PACO data. It may be better just to have the three times a day. But people

also preferred the one time of day. And a lot of people said I would forget to do it if it was that often or I would get tired of doing it. I may keep the option open. I'm still deciding. And then, you know, this kind of shows the, like, participant the kind of data they submitted. So some people were very descriptive in their answers. And some people were less so.

And then, when I was also wanting to know how the mobility report affected their participation or how it would affect their participation because, you know, I told people they would get a report, but didn't really show them what that meant. So it was kind of the first time that they had seen it. And a lot of people, it was kind of split about half and half thought found something that was surprising, you know, would be motivated to participate for longer if they were going to get reports like this on a regular basis. Some people reported that they would try to change their behaviors based on seeing their report. And this was anything from I want to take more active modes of transportation because I noticed that I'm happier when I

use my scooter or, you know, I'm going to, you know, just try to change something up. I noticed that one person had small children at home and he said that, you know, one thing he noticed was he was always in a bad mood when he was traveling with his kids because he had to lug the stroller up and down the stairs and he didn't realize how much that effected his mood until he saw this report. I think there's value in doing that, and I hope to refine it for the future fullscale study.

So I did run into a few technical challenges. You know, onboarding was difficult, especially for a firsttime Google Maps user, if they'd never used it before, it was hard. Different phone operating systems have hidden application settings. So I thought Android phones, okay, here's the instructions. You do this and this while, you know, Samsung has their own extra setting for turning on location history I had no idea about.

And this was true for iPhone and for two other kinds of Android phones. And then, battery life issues, people, I think, even though they've fixed some of the issues with Google Maps, a lot of people would not turn on the kind of always on feature. So that could change the data quality a little bit, too. And then, for methodological challenges, some people didn't fill out enough surveys and some people filled out too many surveys. You know, about a third of the people didn't correct any of their missing mode information.

If Google Maps is unsure of the mode of transportation, it'll just say moving. So some people just left it at that. PACO doesn't have a way to edit diarrhea entries. So when I first started tallying up how many diary entries filling out. Some people were filling out four a day.

I couldn't figure out why that was happening. They were doing duplicate entries when they wanted to add something to the entry. And then, a few people who reported they had a disability didn't experience any transportation challenges at all. So I need to kind of refine the questions that I'm asking about transportation and daylight and make them more specific.

The focus groups were really good. I got good feedback. A few people wanted to know how the transportation costs effect their mood. If they had to take an unexpected Uber or cab ride, what kind of mood because of that. And another person wanted to know to see a followup to the obstacles and delays question. What could've prevented this delay? What needs to be fixed? And another person wanted to know how long the how the trip length would effect someone's mood. This was brought up one day with snow and rain and a miserable day to get around for everyone. As far as motivation, you know, advocacy was mentioned by a couple of people. And a lot of people said, hey, you're going to show this information to the MTA, right? And they really wanted me to share it with

them. So I said, I'll do what I can. And I have tried. You know, one thing I kind of noticed when I was transcribing some of the focus groups were that the focus groups that had at least one person with the disability had a question about, do you ever kind of witness other people experiencing transportation challenges, difficulties, obstacles? Same problems when they're trying to get around?

Well, didn't matter what kind of disability they had, they would elevators, other accessibility issues. When there weren't in the group, they talked about other people experiencing the same things they were experiencing. They would say, oh, yeah we're all suffering. I think there's still some awareness that's missing. So I have, you know, a few ideas for improvements for the full study. So, like I said, I want to provide Gmail accounts for participants. I think that would make some of the onboarding process a lot easier. It's better for anonymity, it won't be connected to their identity at all and probably make people feel more comfortable participating in this kind of study.

I would have more control over the data, eliminate the tech challenges, and L I could automate downloading. So I'm planning to incorporate the focus group feedback. But I also want to add some survey questions about housing and transportation satisfaction and quality of life. And also improve the visual design of the mobility report. So next step, I'm going to be busy this summer, I'm working on a literature review for my dissertation, and I'll give you a preview of what I've found so far and also a proposal. I'm also planning to do kind of a Quasi experimental study using the same methods for people with disabilities.

And also, doing a survey to better understand transportation difficulties. And informational trial judge access for people with disabilities. Because there's and some of the literature I've been reading, informational barriers are pretty powerful barriers. So people can't get the info they need about how to get where they want to go, they may just not try.

And, you know, we kind of assume that most people have smartphones, but there are a lot of people living below poverty that have disabilities that may not have access to that technology. So some of the literature reviews I found I'm kind of going forward with this idea of selfdetermination and transportation. So basically, selfdetermination is the ability to do what you want to do with your life. And I feel that transportation really plays a big role in selfdetermination. And so, these authors that Jesse and Ryan have developed a framework called selfdetermination theory. And one of their metatheories is the basic psychological needs theory. And it says that, you know, for us to do what we need to do, we need to feel autonomous, related to other people and feel competent in what

we're doing. And so, trying to figure out, like, how we can provide those things to people is what I'm interested in learning. And there's not a lot of literature out there about transportation with people with disabilities: But what I'm finding does relate a lot to this. And there are ways to provide supports for these basic psychological needs. And the thing I like about their theory is this isn't, you know, motivation is not something that just comes from within a person. There has to be support for it. So, you know, in the literature, I've kind of identified things that either, you know, thwart autonomy or support it. So access barriers are going to limit, lack of mode choice, financial barriers.

Sometimes, low expectations of teachers, caregivers, parents. This person can't get around on their own. That limits autonomy. And these, you know, factors that support are not a direct opposite of those. Sometimes, they are, and sometimes there's other supports like a mobile device that can give security to the individual trying to get around and also the caregivers because they know they can contact them and find them if something happens. For relatedness, some of the problems I'm seeing are, you know, reluctance to seek help by individuals, especially people with communicative disabilities, a lack of transit employee support and awareness. This kind of separation or segregation of facilities. So putting passengers with disabilities in a separate form of transportation, whether it's a school bus or paired transit. Those things can affect our social development.

And then, you know, visible, physical differences can change the way that strangers interact with you. But if we want to support relatedness, we need to, you know, improve our community and social supports. A lot of studies that I found have experimented with group travel training to teach people of all ages how to get around on their own. Some are teaching older people that have driven their whole lives and now suddenly can't drive anymore. And they never used public transportation in their life.

Doing these group outings and teaching them how to use buses for the first time has been effective. And this is happening in New Jersey. Transit employees support an awareness. Of people with disabilities, I think, a lot of people just don't really know how to interact or know what to look for, know how to help people.

Inclusion and equality are really important factors that support relatedness and also respect is probably one of the most important ones. And as far as competence goes, a lack of navigation skills and transportation experience can make people feel like they're not able or competent enough to travel independently. But also, a lack of access to information can make them feel like they are not competent to travel independently, fear of unknown places. Also, the low expectations of transit employees and members of the public. Maybe someone assuming somebody else needs help. That can diminish feelings over competence. But if we want to support competence, we need to provide travel training and skill development. Multiple modes of informational development and travel companions support skilled development until people become comfortable enough to do it on their own. That's what I'm finding so far. And, yeah,

that's most of my research until this point. And so, now I'll talk a little bit about advocacy work and kind of what I see as the future of accessible transit in New York City. So as I mentioned before, this is a graphic I designed. I got involved last year with the rise and resist elevator action group which was formed roughly a year ago. I think it was like April of last year. And rise and resist is actually a Trump Resistance organization. And they have a lot of different working groups that are, basically, trying to fight all of these oppressive changes coming from our presidential administration. And so, elevators don't really have much to do with that. But this is a civil rights issue that has never really been fully addressed and has been kind of, pushed aside for almost

30 years since the ADA was passed passed. I designed this graphic for one of our early events that was cosponsored with transit center which was an advocacy organization. And they released the report called Access Denied last July. And so I kind of had this idea because, you know, a lot of disability advocates for a long time have been saying a lot of people need elevators. It's not just people with wheelchairs. There's, you know, moms with strollers, people with luggage, all of these people also use the elevator.

So stop pinning it on us. Like, it's we all need this so we should just put in the money and make it happen. And so, since July, this was the kind of first launch event for Access Denied. We've been doing rallies, rally after rally after rally. They've closed down or are closing down 19 stations in the subway to renovate without putting any elevators.

So this is happening throughout New York City and Brooklyn and Queens. Currently on the upper west side, they just closed a station on 86th street yesterday morning for repairs. It's not going to get an elevator. It's pretty clearly in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the federal transportation authority has also issued their opinion about it and said this is not our recommendation. We think that the law is pretty clear that you should be putting elevators in these stations when you renovate them.

So, yeah, we've just been showing up and trying to put public pressure on because that's really the way to make change happen to try to affect those macro layers, you have to control who controls the levers of power. And right now, the levers of power are controlled in Albany for the New York City subway. So Governor Cuomo is in charge of the MTA even if he doesn't always admit to it. He's, basically the decider. And, you know, as a result of our advocacy, we got to have a subway ride with the this is Andy Biford. And so we have went on a subway ride with him a couple of months ago to point out, not just accessibility issues in terms of elevators and, like, going inside of elevators, seeing the conditions of the elevators, but

also, other accessibility issues, like, signage, not being able to hear announcements. There's so many problems. We started a crowdsourced document to start listing out the issues with subway stations, cars, platforms, station agents. You know, subway conductors, drivers, bus stops. Almost eight pages long now. There's so many problems that need to be fixed.

So he was very supportive, he said he was already kind of on our team. And we were preaching to the choir when we were taking him on this ride. But nevertheless, we showed him a few new things. And yeah, he released his corporate plan a few weeks ago called Fast Forward.

And this is a broadreaching corporate plan to modernize the whole New York City transit. So that's not only the subways, but also the buses and pair transit. I'm going to show you another video. Where he talks about how he sees the New York subway.

I'm going to grab this mic.

Sometimes, to truly appreciate a place, it helps to be from somewhere else. I just can't resist the greatest of cities. Someone that inherently believes in public transit. Riding the New York subway is worth traveling thousands of miles for. I've been on subways all over the world, there's nothing like New York. New York led the way over 100 years ago. It grew quickly into one of the world's great transit systems inspiring every subway that followed with the innovations. And to me, the bus network is just as equally as good. New York leads the way. Even when things weren't so good for transit, it persevered.

New York is just renowned for the way it deals with crisis. I live in New York now, I love the place and I ride the subway every day to work. And I still feel the same way I did when I was just a tourist, complete and utter awe for this transit system in the city. I'm Andy Byford and I'm the president of MTA New York.

And we know that the transit system isn't what it should be. It's not what a world class city like New York deserves. On behalf of my 50,000 fellow employees, we're making a promise to you today. And we want you to hold us to it. Our plan is called Fast Forward. We're going to transform the subway. We're going to reimagine the bus network. We're going to accelerate accessibility. And, we're going to engage and empower our employees to provide outstanding customer service. Because New York deserves world class transit that is fast, reliable and accessible. And because doing nothing is not an option.

But we can't do it alone. We'll need the commitment and support of our partners in government at the city, state and federal level. Most importantly, we ask for your patience and understanding to do the necessary work to bring your transit system back. So please read our plan and let us know what you think. I'm incredibly proud to be given the honor of running New York City Transit. I look forward to seeing you out there on the system soon.

I don't know if you noticed any similarities to my own video. But when I watched them together, I was, like, this is a little some eerie similarities with the piano music and the aerial photos of New York City. I thought that was interesting. So, yeah, that's, you know, he's got a plan that's ambitious. He wants to put in 50 new elevators, stations in the next fiveyear capital plan. And 100 stations in the five years after that.

But as of right now, it's words on paper. And we need the money to back it up. And so, we can't really stop protesting and we can't stop putting pressure on our elected officials. And, you know, we try to get in the news and try to bring more awareness to the issue.

And we're going to keep doing that. So vote, please. All right. That's my presentation.

Thank you. [ Applause ]

And now, if we have questions, since we're livestreaming, just want to make sure people speak into the mic.

Mic runner.

Is this on?

Yeah.

Okay. Firstly, thank you for a great presentation. I actually put in a shotout to the group on Facebook, and you got a bunch of heart reacts.

Thank you.

Probably, I guess, from my own perspective doing documents access for people's disabilities presented here last year.

I saw that. I was here.

Awesome. Two things I was wondering. Firstly, have you looked at some of the have you looked at are you planning to look at some of the challenges with navigating the system to map signage and then when outages occur or delays occur how that gets communicated? Because there have been a number over high profile cases with adults with cognitive disabilities getting stranded in other boroughs in New Jersey, in different accounts on the metro.

I was wondering how you were planning to address that particularly given that surveying people with cognitive disabilities usually requires different survey methodologies from people who are not people with cognitive daylights.

Right.

And then, the other question was, I was wondering if you were planning to look at the intersection of language access and disability. Particularly, given that so many people with disabilities in New York and in the northeast also not only are limited English proficient but also after their retire out of the workforce lose English because they're in particularly Russian or Spanishspeaking communities or Yiddish speaking communities and the signage is often lacking the Yiddish signage is written in a dialect.

So I was wondering if if you were planning to incorporate that and how you were planning to do that.

Yeah. So I think there's I'll answer your second question first. Because I think there's a lot of overlaps with accessibility. And I think language is something that I'm really interested in because I only speak English and a little bit of Spanish, but this is really my first language and I know what it's like to go to a foreign country where there's virtually no English spoken and how isolating it can feel. And I feel like there's a lot of overlap of design changes we can make that would benefit both of those populations, people with cognitive disabilities and people with language barriers. But also, just regular people, I mean, I I think partly because of my upbringing being driven around, I have serious navigational difficulties. Like, I still get lost Google Maps has kind of really changed the way I

get around because I can only get so lost if I can see my blue dot on the map. So, yeah, it's definitely an interest of mine. So I'm going to, you know, if I'm doing surveys, I want to translate into a few other languages to get more people to participate. I don't think I can personally change the design of the subway stations. I would love to do that.

And I have some ideas for doing that. But I think for now, it's going to have to kind of rely on mobile technology, I think, and play a big role. I've been talking to Peggy Gross who was the, basically, in charge of travel training for adolescents with cognitive disabilities for New York City public school district ' 5, for 40 years, and so she's been a wealth of information with ideas about how to, you know, do research with people with cognitive disabilities and also to understand what their needs are.

So I'm definitely looking at travel training, like, as part of my research. And she's got a lot of stuff that's currently not digitized, like, reports that she did in the '80s, that I'm going to try to get my hands on and, actually, make a resource out of. So, yeah, it's definitely something I'm considering. I would love to talk to you more about it.

And as I develop my research if you're interested, yeah. Great. Thank you.

Hey, you know, we already know each other. This is sort of like a general question for you and also for other folks in the room to think about. What would your suggestions be for ablebodied and people with disabilities working together in the community to make sure that accessibility actually happens? Because more often than not, you know, most of these communities are not intersectional. And disability is often forgotten. And I always bring up, like, number one I've only been an amputee 4 1/2 years and number two, not everybody stays healthy and ablebodied for their entire lives. And so we have to think about the future with it. And so, but also, we should just be human beings with each other.

And so, how can we better work together as a community recognizing that it's the right thing to do?

Yeah. I don't have all of the answers to that question. I mean, I'm trying to do my part even though I have an invisible disability that's kind of like a sometimes disability. I straddle the line. And most people perceive me as a nondisabled person. And a lot of times, I think, I get the oh, you're just a savior person coming in. There definitely needs to be more awareness.

I think part of the problem of having people primarily being driven around impaired transit because they can't use the subway is a huge problem because if we actually saw people with disabilities, in our daily lives, walking down the street, in the real representation of our population, I think people would be a lot more aware just from that.

Instead of getting stared at and pictures taken and people stopping traffic as you're walking by.

Yeah, it happens to

Me.

Yeah, and it's happened to my friends. I totally am aware of that. I don't know how to reach people who are not disabled and this is not on their radar other than to trying to get this message out in the media, other than, trying to share my experiences, my knowledge, signal boosting other people's experiences. You know, I don't twitter is, like, not everyone's on Twitter. Anytime I hear about someone experiencing a horrific ride or any other transportationrelated issue, getting stuck in a subway because the elevator's broken, having to get carried out by firefighters, this stuff happens on a daily basis. And most people are not aware. I think I was not really aware before, you know, I kind of had this third relapse. Really started to effect my motor functions and I was out of work for a couple of weeks. After that,

I sprained my ankle and that made it worse. This awareness, I think, unfortunately, doesn't happen with unless it effects somebody personally. Unless they know something. Am I going to take a baseball bat around and start breaking legs to become more aware? No. But I think yeah, we need to boost the message and try to get it out there as much as possible. Yeah.

Thank you. So I noticed you use Google Maps as part of your methodology, which is map applications general are notoriously inaccessible for blind and lowvision users. I was wondering what work arounds you plan to use to get around that to incorporate the experiences of blind and lowvision people in your study.

Right. I did have one blind person in my pilot study. And she was the one like, one of the few people that had difficulties with doing some of the maps, editing of modes and downloading the files and uploading them. So for the future phase, I'm going to be providing people with a Gmail account.

So potentially, they wouldn't really have to interact with Google Maps at all. She didn't have problems with the PACO survey. So I guess her she could enlarge it or use it. So I'll be using kind of the data from that about the modes of transportation that was used to verify in maps what kind of modes people are using.

But, yeah, if people have other ideas for making maps more accessible on mobile for screen readers, I would be all ears. Thomas has one. Oh, you do?

One of my passions.

I need to add that.

Yeah, we'll talk more. But it's definitely something I'm trying to work out. Yeah.

I had a question, since I've got the mic conveniently. The stations that just the ones that happen to get elevators, do you know what data attributes the city uses to make that determination?

So this, basically, right now, there are about 13 stations shy of meeting this 100 key station agreement that they decided the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed or during integration. Your advocacy is working they agreed to do it 30 years ago and they're getting around to it. Not to be a downer on or say that advocacy doesn't work. We can't really take credit for those at this point.

They did improve or increase some of the current capital budget to add even more stations that were not part of the plan, but I think it's only five new elevators for five new stations and they're not really sure which ones are going to get what. Andy Byford said in his plan that he plans to prioritize areas where there's not enough coverage of elevators. So his goal for the next fiveyear plan with the 50 new stations would be to have no more than two station distance to an accessible station.

But there's, you know, there's a lot of issues. He also needs to work out in terms of elevator maintenance because they break down really too frequently. The, you know, the kind of notifications when an elevator breaks down is not automated. So, it basically takes someone discovering that the elevator's broken, calling in and recording it and someone putting it on the website for that information to be updated. They also need to have a realtime kind of elevator status system so it's, actually, usable. Because, you know, if you tell people, like, oh, hey, look, now there's all of these new stations with elevators, like, go see the world, you know, the first time they encounter broken elevator, get stuck in a subway station, that's going to deter them from trying to use it, again.

And you were saying that one of the mitigations now is to call the fire department and that's

Yeah, that happens. The police. Yeah, Dustin Jones, the founder of united for equal access and involved in other campaigns, he jokes that, you know, if you want to meet the New York police department or New York Fire Department, ride the subway in a wheelchair, there's a good chance they're going to have to come carry you out because, yeah, if there's not another accessible station anywhere nearby, you don't have a lot of options. So yeah.

That's the unfortunate reality for people.

So I'm curious if you got enough data in order to slice it by different transit methods and different systems. New York Transit System has a lot going on. The subway system is really three subway systems, the bus system is across five boroughs and all different weirdness going on. I'm curious if you noticed anything that were drastically different about the bus system in Manhattan versus the subway system in Brooklyn.

I don't think I have enough data to look at it at this point. I only had 20 participants. And I haven't done, like, enough of the quantitative analysis yet. Just because the data quality was mixed and, you know, there was missing data. So I'm trying to kind of work on some analysis plans just using what I have. But I wouldn't really feel comfortable reporting that back. Right now.

That makes sense. I'll join the crowd. Doing loads more research.

Yeah. And I'm trying to think figure out if I need to shrink my study area, too, and make it only people that use public transit or something like that because the when you throw in cars and other things, it's like, I don't know what I'm really comparing. Yeah. So things I need to think about.

Here I come.

Just going to go back to your point about being stuck in a subway. I've been stuck in a subway three times. And they took an hour and a half to come and get me. And to carry this chair out, my chair is 200 pounds. Six guys had to carry it out plus carrying me.

That's eight people. Even that is, like, that deters us from taking the trains.

Yeah.

Buses when their ramps get broken, we get stuck on there. So I understand what's going on with this. But in a personal view, I'm glad that you are doing something like this. Because it's really helping us out.

Thank you. I hate hearing stories like that. And I just have to say because it's, like, I can't yeah. It's unimaginable for most people. But and at the same time, they don't know this is happening every day. So it's really yeah, it's unreported. There's no I mean, the MTA doesn't really do research on how many people are getting injured, for instance, like, you know, they keep track of how many people die in the subway, but that's about it as far as, like, incidence, right? So if they started tracking it, that would be a new story that might wake people up.

You talked about the problems with delays and so on. Everybody knows we have Lyft and Uber and you can call it and see the car making its way towards you. Have they introduced this kind of stuff to this?

Sort of. Iman can probably talk more about it. They are doing a pilot with a taxi app called Curb. It's a pilot and they're not rolling it out.

Started a pilot in November. I work at the New York Lawyers at the public interest doing disability justice work. I have been using accessiride for eight years. It's improved a little bit. They give you a call reminder and emails, which they never used to do because their assumption was, you guys aren't using emails. What do you need an email for? Whatever. And most recently, they started the ondemand curb app that came out of the meetings with our coalition called ARG access ride reform group. Yeah. And they like to take credit for it starting the Curb app. But they weren't thinking about it until meetings with us. That was great. It's awesome, except if you live in an outer borough. There aren't that many cabs out there. I live out in Throgs neck in the Bronx. Sometimes, I'm waiting for ten minutes.

There's one morning I waited 2 1/2 hours. If you have a fulltime job, that doesn't work. If I work anywhere else, my ass would have been fired. That's real. And they're not thinking that people who have disabilities have college degrees, have jobs, have lives. I have siblings I want to see. I have a boyfriend, I want to have a life.

And booking your life, a day or two in advance doesn't work for you. But using an ondemand app that isn't really ondemand also doesn't work. Even in midtown, there was a time I was going out for my friend's birthday on a Friday. Our office is on 30th street, it took me an hour and 25 minutes to get a ride. Why? Because there weren't that many rides.

Well, then make it that way. Make them have more rides. And, I think unfortunately, you know the MTA put out a low bid, Uber and Lyft weren't going to take it and the new company took it. So, it's like, okay, you guys aren't that technologically savvy, whatever. But, like, hey, MTA, put out a little bit more money, you get federal money to have a transit system that works. What are you doing with the Federal money to coming to make paratransit better? And I think they're putting it in their pockets and we pay for it, by the way. It's not free.

Right.

We pay full price. We don't get any discounts. We don't get any, like, oh, buy ten rides, get two free. We don't get that. Not only is the MTA inaccessible, we can't take advantage of the services there, it is extremely expensive. A couple of months ago, I stallied it up and spent $450 in one month. Going and coming to work, going to meetings and hanging out.

Living miff life. I don't understand how that is considered fair simply because I'm an amputee. First of all, I didn't ask for your shit. I'm an amputee, I didn't ask for it, didn't sign up for it, it happened, it's here, I rock it, whatever. Don't punish me for something I had no control over. And that I'm living my life and trying to get through. Like, it's just not fair and it's not right. And that's not what Jesus would do. There you go.

On top of that, Accessiride, between $70 and 75 per ride. It's a shared service. I don't know how this is happening. If they wanted to switch over to an Uber type of system today, they also have to think about the 1400 pair transit vehicles that are operated by 14 separate transportation companies and all of the drivers involved.

So I think that it's kind of turned into a huge mess. They should have been kind of working on accessibility of the whole system, all this time. They made a decision, oh, you know, it'll be cheaper for us to just drive people around and so we're not going to bother with elevators. And so that's been their MO up until now.

But I think, yeah, this new transit chief kind of gets it and how it needs to happen. But he needs monetary support to make it happen. Okay. Yeah. All right. I also wanted to mention that I'm sharing these slides if anyone wants to access them later, the link BIT.ly/A11YJUNE2018.

And even added alt tags to the images to be extra accessible.

Awesome. Time for one more question.

I don't really have a question. But probably my research. My name is Prince, I'm doing my internship in New York here. I'm from Purdue University. Last year, a project I did was I designed a mobile application and sort of a service for visual impaired woman in Ireland. So it was a project that's collaborated with the engineering department. So I'm bringing this up because you mentioned about data collection and how you can kind of track the number of disabled people who board the trains and also the subways.

Okay.

So, yeah, we Christina, we designed this for Christina, she's in Ireland and she's and what she's able to do, she's able to navigate her way to the bus station. But when she gets to the bus station, you know, you get a lot of people all over during this to be recognized. What we thought we could if we could make the signings over there digitized in such a way that when she gets to the bus station, she would click the mobile app and just notify the system that this person is on this route. And she was supposed to the driver or the bus in the car can be able to identify her. So from that, it was hard for we're trying to collaborate with the Ireland bus system for this project. But just weren't interested.

Hmm.

So continuing

Please

Yeah.

Please email me, I would love to hear more about the project.

Yeah. But finally, when we design that currently we are working on developing. And what I learned from it was that advocacy in such areas and the fact that people have to take the steps. That's why I really appreciate the work you're doing. And for me, I've my farther was a stroke patient for 15 years. That was when I was 10 years. All my life, you know, I've been living with I was living with a disabled man. So I'm passionate about it. And your question about how we can all try to involve people in, you know, how we can bring people together to kind of advocate for I think endeavors, we should preach about empathy. Right? It's really critical. You don't necessarily have to be in the position.

To be able to understand. You can think with people, you can see in your mind eye about how people kind of trouble or situation they go through. Then, I mean, you can also help and take steps. That's my motivation for coming here. I appreciate it. You guys.

Thanks. Yeah.

All right. Then, awesome note to end on, I think, at that point. That you think so much, Jessica for presenting.

Thank you. [ Applause ]

It was awesome. And thank you to Thottbot for hosting us, this is fantastic. And we'll have our next meetup next month. Thank you so much. And we have a little bit of time to hang out here and chatter if you have some other questions. But we will start kicking people out not too long in the future. So with that, thanks so much, have a good night.

If you want to get your own elevators are for everyone Tshirt, you can buy it on rise and resist.org. 1