Amtrak Station Accessibility

David Benton wrote:The little fella in my avatar would argue all dogs are pretty smart .

Judging from many of your posts one might assume he's your typist

David Benton wrote:True ,but then they have to find the sign .I'm thinking maybe the guide dogs are trained to lead them to a sign on demand .d

Not everyone who might read the braille is totally blind and has guide dogs. There are those who are legally blind, but are not totally blind. Depending on their condition, they can perceive light, see outlines, see objects in their peripheral vision. They might be able to find the sign, but are not able to visually read it. They could read the braille to make sure they are at the right station and place.

Patrick Boylan wrote:

David Benton wrote:The little fella in my avatar would argue all dogs are pretty smart .

Judging from many of your posts one might assume he's your typist

You'll know when he takes over by the sudden improvement !

electricron wrote:

neroden wrote:On the other hand, platforms at approximately the same level as the train interior, with flat plates for bridging any gap or minor height difference, are *far* preferable to wheelchair lifts. I really hope that can be resolved. Many of the low-level stations served by the single-level fleet are on passengers-come-first lines already (everything in Vermont, the state-owned line in North Carolina, Chicago Union Station, the tracks owned by FLDOT), or have room for separate platform tracks (Buffalo), so it seems like conversion to high-level platforms would be wise in these areas.

Chicago's Union Station also serves Superliner and Talgo equipment with low floor entrances. Fixing all the platforms in Chicago to serve single level high floor trains better means they serve Superliner and Talgo equipment worse.

No, no, the idea would be to have a single high-level platform for the fairly small collection of trains coming from the east, and standardize the rest on low-level platforms. The Midwest is mostly bilevels already, and is already ordering bilevels to replace most of its corridor trains, so better to standardize on that. The Talgo-Superliner difference is another matter; I wonder if that can be handled with bridgeplates rather than lifts, but it's probably too much.

And while there are rail lines across the country that serve passenger trains first, they also serve freight trains. You're NCRR example seems true - but NCRR makes far more more money from freight fees which helps subsidize their passenger trains. It would be a poor decision to chase freight trains off their corridor by building incompatible tall passenger platforms.

Since standard freight cars actually will apparently run past high passenger platforms (with major speed restrictions), I can't see there being much of a problem with putting in high platforms on some of the Vermont-type lines where the freight trains are already crawling at 10 mph. As for the NCRR, it's being fully double-tracked, and for starters all the high platforms could be put on only *one* of the two tracks...

There are light rail lines, with no need at all to accommodate freight trains, in the US with low level platforms using high floor light rail trains. They use high blocks to embark and disembark wheelchair using passengers.

They're all converting to low-floor light rail cars, FYI; I've been following the "high-floor LRT" lines with low platforms individually. The ones which still do this sort of complicated thing bought their current trains before low-floor light rail cars were readily available, and plan to end it when their older trains are retired (which may take up to 20 more years, as some were bought in the 1990s).

It's alright to suggest your own opinion, but each and every passenger train operator needs to make their own decision. And I'm suggesting that legislating just one way to implement train access nationally does not and will never work....

I'm sure there will be some stations which need to both have low platforms and have single-level "NY Penn" stock visiting them, and will therefore need to use lifts or "high blocks", but it's also clear that one wants to avoid this as much as possible, as both solutions are complicated and slow to use, and the wheelchair users don't like them.

Actually, if the US had legislated just one way to implement train access nationally *back in the 19th century*, before we baked in high platforms at NY Penn and bilevels in the West, we wouldn't be facing these incompatibilities. Obviously that's too much to ask for (nobody was thinking about wheelchair users in the 19th century) but national standards are, on the whole, a good thing, when they're well thought out. Without them we end up with gratuitous incompatibilities. I think most people wish Australia had a national standardized track gauge, for instance.

FYI, for the hell of it, I ran through every Amtrak station (other than whistlestops, special-service-only stations, "suspended service" stations and Canadian stations), crossed off all those which Amtrak already considers wheelchair-accessible, separated the rest according to Amtrak's ADA report regarding whether they needed an accessible path to the platform or not, Googled for reports of progress, and was left with this list:

No path to platform:
Amherst MA (to be closed)
Ardmore PA (project planned for 2012 start by SEPTA)
Camden SC
Claremont NH
Cumberland MD (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Denmark SC
Greensburg PA
Harpers Ferry WV
Mount Joy PA
Middletown PA (funded, to start 2013)
Newark DE (supposedly to be done in 2012 by Amtrak)
N Philadelphia PA (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Port Kent NY (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Rouses Point NY (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
West Glacier MT (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Windsor CT (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Windsor VT

Have accessible path to platform but are not considered accessible (need lifts?):
Birmingham MI
Browning MT
Clemson SC
Clifton Forge VA
Coatesville PA
Delray Beach FL
Detroit Lakes MN
Dillon SC (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Downingstown PA
Ephrata WA
Jesup GA
La Grange IL
Laguna Nigel CA
Michigan City IN
Okeechobee FL
Parkesburg PA
San Clemente CA (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)
Staples MN
Summit IL
Windsor Locks CT (supposedly in progress by Amtrak)

All the Keystone stations are part of large planning efforts to substantially reconstruct them, which is why they are taking so long. Amtrak is apparently pushing out lifts aggressively to try to prove good faith on ADA compliance, so one would expect many of the stations with an accessible path to the platform will get lifts in 2012. I think the noncompliant Vermonter stations have HSR funding for reconstruction, but I could be wrong. I have no idea what's delaying West Glacier MT, Harpers Ferry VA, Greensburg PA, Denmark SC, or Camden SC, but none of them even seem to have plans for accessibility yet.

neroden wrote:

There are light rail lines, with no need at all to accommodate freight trains, in the US with low level platforms using high floor light rail trains. They use high blocks to embark and disembark wheelchair using passengers.

They're all converting to low-floor light rail cars, FYI; I've been following the "high-floor LRT" lines with low platforms individually. The ones which still do this sort of complicated thing bought their current trains before low-floor light rail cars were readily available, and plan to end it when their older trains are retired (which may take up to 20 more years, as some were bought in the 1990s).

Correction: I just remembered Denver, which is running high-floor cars with low-floor platforms and complicated mini-highs and is *not* currently planning to upgrade. (Of the other pre-ADA systems, San Diego, San Jose, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, & Toronto are all converting to low-floor trams, San Francisco is converting to high platforms, and LA is all high platforms.) I don't know what Denver is thinking.

neroden wrote:

neroden wrote:

There are light rail lines, with no need at all to accommodate freight trains, in the US with low level platforms using high floor light rail trains. They use high blocks to embark and disembark wheelchair using passengers.

They're all converting to low-floor light rail cars, FYI; I've been following the "high-floor LRT" lines with low platforms individually. The ones which still do this sort of complicated thing bought their current trains before low-floor light rail cars were readily available, and plan to end it when their older trains are retired (which may take up to 20 more years, as some were bought in the 1990s).

Correction: I just remembered Denver, which is running high-floor cars with low-floor platforms and complicated mini-highs and is *not* currently planning to upgrade. (Of the other pre-ADA systems, San Diego, San Jose, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, & Toronto are all converting to low-floor trams, San Francisco is converting to high platforms, and LA is all high platforms.) I don't know what Denver is thinking.

Toronto doesn't have to listen to the ADA as it is not in the U.S.

neroden wrote: (Of the other pre-ADA systems, San Diego, San Jose, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, & Toronto are all converting to low-floor trams

Where did you get your info, particularly about Philadelphia and Pittsburgh?
I live near Philly. I've heard nothing to say that we're ready to buy new streetcars anytime soon, much less that anybody's decided what height platform.

Pretty much the same about Pittsburgh, I haven't heard that they're planning to get new equipment soon, although what they have if I'm not mistaken is over 25 years old, just a bit newer than Philly's LRV's. But ALL of Pittsburgh's upgraded station platforms are high level, with just a short low level section legacy from PCC car operations. As far as I know they use the single low level door per side only at the few street running stops that don't have platforms. They'd have to convert all their stations to low level platforms to accomodate your purported low floor cars.

And you left out New Orleans from your pre-ADA list.

M&Eman wrote:
Toronto doesn't have to listen to the ADA as it is not in the U.S.

It is if Watson is to be believed.

Bleah, you are of course correct, Pittsburgh is not going low-floor, they are slowly going all high-platform, having built high platforms in their tunnels.

Philadelphia, with low platforms even in the tunnel (like Boston), definitely had low-floor trolleys on its agenda, but I'm sorry I've lost the citations, as they're from *old* planning documents in the early days of low-floor trams, which I didn't save. The low-floor trolleys are only on their agenda for "when the current ones are replaced", which appears to be indefinitely far in the future (why, the Kawasakis are only 30 years old, why start planning to replace them now?). So they could change their minds I suppose and get something overly complicated with lifts. They probably won't; the same "less maintenance" logic which applied in Boston, and which has driven agencies to get low-floor buses with ramps rather than high-floor buses with lifts, applies to Philly.

I didn't sort out all-high and all-low originally (and I clearly did an incompetent job when trying to sort them out afterwards!), as my original point when cataloging was that nobody likes the mixed or mini-high option -- except Denver, and I honestly have no idea why they like it.

Though I also forgot Buffalo, which has put itself in a position where they need high-platforming vehicles for the subway, but have only one-car-length (mini?) highs in the surface section. Each time I see a planning document from them, it apologetically talks about how impractical it is to build full-length high platforms on Main Street; they'd clearly rather have done so originally. But that system is not growing, so it may end up with one-car trains.

You're also right about New Orleans. That's an odd one. They're deliberately running historic equipment and replicas of historic equipment, and using car-mounted wheelchair lifts. This is far from efficient and far from reliable, but I think they decided the tourism value of "historic" outweighed everything else. Philadelphia's Girard streetcar is in a similar category of odd, really.

Speaking as someone who is very close to someone who uses a wheelchair, the easiest transit access we have ever experienced, bar none, is the low-floor-with-ramp buses on the 16th Street Mall in Denver. Second-easiest would probably be the Downeaster, with lift-buses such as Portland has and the MBTA Green Line well behind. I should note that this person has never ridden the other T lines, which do have level-boarding but largely don't go where we want to go in Boston.

Station accessibility upgrades completed during FY 2012:
Auburn, CA
Berkeley, CA
Turlock-Denair, CA

Accessibility upgrades substantially complete since Sept. 2012:
Guadalupe, CA
Lompoc-Surf, CA
Needles, CA
Redding, CA
San Luis Obispo, CA
Stockton, CA

Projects out for bid:
Gilman, IL
Dyer, IN
Michigan City, IN
Rensselaer, IN
Amsterdam, NY (interior only)
Port Kent, NY
Ticonderoga, NY
Whitehall, NY
Randolph, VT
St. Albans, VT
Waterbury, VT

Accessibility projects scheduled for later in FY 2013:
Lorton, VA
Prince, WV
Staunton, VA
White Sulphur Springs, WV

http://www.greatamericanstations.com/ad ... -26-12.pdf

Other announced project: Lancaster, PA
http://fox43.com/2013/01/16/amtrak-movi ... z2IlYux8qu

I found an update to that Boxing Day report.

The contracts have been awarded on all those projects above listed as out to bid or scheduled for later in 2013.

Of those, the following are now shown as substantially complete (there must not have been much to do):
Michigan City
Rensselaer, IN
Port Kent
Whitehall
Staunton
Randolph
Waterbury
White Sulphur Springs.

In addition, two Ohio stations have been bid, awarded and are substantially complete.
Alliance
Elyria

And contracts have been awarded on a new round of station accessibility upgrades. Those stations are:
Anniston, AL
Williams Junction, AZ
Winslow, AZ
Yuma, AZ
Barstow, CA
Ontario, CA
Palm Springs, CA
Pomona, CA
Victorville, CA
Jacksonville, FL
Okeechobee, FL
Sanford, FL
Tampa, FL
Gainsville, GA
Savannah, GA
Bryan, OH
Camden, SC
Denmark, SC

For stations with fewer than 7500 boardings and alightings per year, the platforms are not being raised but Amtrak will use wheelchair lifts. For the stations with more than 7500 passengers per year, a level boarding platform will be provided. Stations listed with platforms designed at 48" high are Jacksonville, Tampa, Savannah and Lancaster.

Found on a page appended to http://www.amtrak.com/ccurl/14/262/Cong ... ug2012.pdf