Disability Perspective: MUNI T.E.P. -- Lack of Thought on Health Impacts

by Bob Planthold, 2008-12-16

Another Holiday Season analysis about the lumps of coal (and pessimism) that city agencies bestow on people with disabilities at year's end. We all are aware of lots of cuts in all sorts of social service programs and health programs. Meaning the poor, seniors, people with disabilities, single parents, and many newcomers to this country are targeted to suffer the most. That's too broad, though, to get a feel for how poorly done is the thinking and work done by city staff and policy-makers.

Let's focus on the MUNI Transit Effectiveness Program [TEP]. So far, most of the letters to the editor and the comments at public meetings follow a grade-school level civics and economics approach: (1) Do what the majority wants; and (2) MUNI can't afford to provide current services. So, the MTA Board of Directors has gone along with accepting the revised recommendations provided by staff.

Next, there will be an E.I.R [environmental impact review] on MUNI's TEP cuts. Yet even in this supposedly "green" process, there is a bias against people with disabilities.

These federal and state environmental laws were passed in the mid 1970s, long before the state of California revised its building codes to require full accessibility and even longer before the federal civil rights law called Americans with Disabilities Act was passed. So? In talking to various professionals with degrees and long experience in planning, NOT ONE ever heard of any EIR analysis that analyzed how cutting fixed-route transit lines and services might actually have to also look at PARAtransit services.

Here's the neglect. Paratransit is a federally-required complementary service to fixed-route service. When MUNI, or AC Transit or Golden Gate Transit, eliminate lines or portions of lines, then those transit-dependent people with disabilities can qualify for the much more expensive paratransit. That's a simple cost issue, though, which is not part of many EIR analyses.

However, planning professionals, policymakers, elected officials, the media, and many acclaimed transit advocates who are able-bodied ALL fail to take into account the population demographics of the Bay Area and especially of San Francisco. San Francisco has a large and growing number and percentage of seniors who live longer and also a large and growing number and percentage of people with disabilities who are active and living out in the community.

Take, for example, MUNI's plans to cut various bus lines in hilly areas of SF -- the 6, several of the lines numbered in the 30s and in the 50s, the 18, and elsewhere. While each of these lines has a small ridership, MUNI doesn't know how many of those riders have a disability, nor how many in-home care workers who serve residents in the areas scheduled to be isolated are transit dependent and will no longer be able to provide those required services or provide mandated special educational services.

Nor does MUNI know the ages of the riders in these hilly areas. MUNI hasn't done any projections on how many residents of these soon-to-be-abandoned route portions in hilly areas will age into being seniors over 80, a population cohort more likely to be eligible for paratransit.

Yet the more people who are seniors or have a disability and are living in areas MUNI plans to abandon, the more likely they will qualify for paratransit. That means there needs be an estimate on how many new paratransit vans will be needed. Initially, this seems more a capital expense decision.

Here's where EIR analysis may not be up-to-date in its requirements. EIRs are supposed to measure factors that include how much congestion might change, how much pollution might change, and other environmental effects. As more paratransit vans are needed, the more pollution they'll produce.

Further, due to the very small numbers of people with disabilities a paratransit van can normally carry, as these vans travel in and through hilly areas, they'll have to pull over and idle while an oncoming delivery truck, passenger car, taxicab, or even another paratransit van passes. Nobody has thought to calculate how much extra pollution will be produced by this stationary engine idling from additional paratransit vans travelling along SF's streets and roads.

The mid-1970s environmental laws didn't contemplate such population and transportation changes, so they are silent about such demographic and service factors.

Still, no one amongst the various staffers in city government departments has thought to deal with this demographic reality of disability. Even if not specifically required by legislation more than 1/3 of a century old, still it seems logical that prevailing community standards, changing demographics, and the environmental impacts of new laws ought to be in the thinking of those doing EIRs.

Such isn't the case. We may have a MUNI TEP implemented that makes worse the pollution in hilly areas, which means even more difficulty in breathing for seniors and for people with disabilities.

Who failed to think clearly here? Is it just MUNI?

Or does it also include the Planning Department, the City Attorney, the Department of the Environment, the Mayor's Office, the Public Health Department, the Controller's staff, the Supervisors, and able-bodied advocates -- all of whom worked on and supported the TEP's recommendations to cut services WITHOUT realizing, let alone calculating, the health impact of extra pollution on people with disabilities and on surrounding neighbors?

How many people in authority missed the obvious? And how many in the TEP and follow-on EIR process will own up to their neglect and sins of omission regarding the disabled?

Happy Holidays -- or a Dickensian "Bah, humbug!" to a city government and leadership that so blithely allow this to happen.