August 12-18, 2004

city beat

Sight Work

Despite two lawsuits in the '90s, advocates say SEPTA needs to do more for the blind.

by Rebecca Bellville

On a recent trip to SEPTA's Allegheny Avenue station, Pat Grebloski noticed a problem she regularly faces.

Though the Center City woman was getting off the Market-Frankford El at her destination, the voice coming over the loudspeaker announced that the train was three or four stations south. If she hadn't been paying attention, she might have thought she was actually at Berks, York-Dauphin or Huntingdon.

Luckily, Grebloski had been monitoring the turns in the train tracks. After all, she can't just look out the window to figure out where she is.

When it comes to navigating the public-transportation system, blind passengers have to develop strategies to get where they're going. In many cases, they're left to depend on their own ingenuity or the kindness of strangers, including fellow passengers or drivers who make a point to find out where they're going as they board the bus. Short of assistance, if their concentration lapses for a second, they could get lost. It's not that they mind being cognizant of their surroundings, rather they just want to know why the system designed to announce the proper stops on buses and trains often fails them.

"I pretty [much] know where the stops are," says Grebloski, who uses a cane and sports sunglasses after having lost her vision to glaucoma and cataracts in 1980.

She says she didn't have much of a choice but to intricately learn the line, because SEPTA's station-announcing "enunciation system" is far from spot on.

It's hard to pin down exactly how often that enunciation system gets a glitch, but when it does, the problem trickles down to inaccurate announcements up and down the line. SEPTA spokeswoman Sylvana Hoyos says the recording starts at the beginning of each route when a driver or train conductor enters an identification code. From there, any problems can be a result of a software problem, weather or an inaccurate code, adds Hoyos.

If a problem arises on a bus or train, the vehicle must be stopped in order to reset the recording. (For trains, that means it persists until the end of the line. For buses, drivers are encouraged to call out the stops themselves, Hoyos says, noting that those who don't are subject to discipline.)

Though Hoyos notes that the transportation agency hasn't fielded many complaints, Jim Antonacci, president of National Federation of the Blind's state chapter, interprets each instance of a blind passenger on a route where the enunciation fails as a slight. He says it results from drivers who don't care, or a transit system that's unwilling to fix its technology.

"A competent blind person knows where they're going," says Antonacci, who also counts the stops each trip. "What I hate is the thought that the driver can control this."

He wants both El and SEPTA bus drivers to take that extra step of helping every blind passenger that boards their vehicles. This wouldn't cost anything and drivers decades ago used to do it anyway, he says.

In 1991, the federation sued SEPTA because some bus drivers weren't announcing stops, which violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Within three months, SEPTA agreed that bus drivers would announce stops in Center City and at other major intersections, a rule that's still in effect, says Tom Earle, who was involved with the suit as a lawyer with the Disabilities Law Project, a nonprofit Pennsylvania law firm that provides legal help to disabled persons.

Within three years of the settlement, though, the federation had to again sue because compliance was "horrible," says Earle.

All that legal action occurred before SEPTA purchased a new bus fleet that came with the enunciation system. (The system on the El came with new trains around 1996, with employees announcing stops on the Regional Rail and Broad Street lines.) It relies on the Global Positioning System, which uses satellite navigation.

Still, Antonacci says the satellites must have been out of whack when he rode a bus up Chestnut Street not too long ago. Even though there was a detour, the system kept announcing the wrong bus stops, he says.

SEPTA driver Tom Smith, who drives the Route 5 bus from Front and Market streets to the Frankford Transportation Center, estimates that the system breaks down about once a week.

"Sometimes it'll stop working and then come on by itself," says Smith. He notes that he doesn't have many visually impaired riders, but he says that when he does, he asks them where they are going and tells them when they arrive. Drivers, however, aren't trained to fix it, so they have to wait for someone else to come do the job.

Even so, Antonacci would be happy with an entire crew of drivers that followed Smith's philosophy. He doesn't think they're asking for much more than a little courtesy from a transit agency that doesn't even have firm numbers on its number of blind passengers.

"We do not believe that the environment needs to be changed for a blind person," says Antonacci. "Does the city need to install some talking traffic light and cost the city millions of dollars? Absolutely not."