PAT GOING: Thank you for this opportunity. I’m here with my colleague, Rob Gilkerson, and we are representing the Rocky Mountain disability business and technical assistance center, also known as a DBTAC. This is an entity that is an information center, and we handle this particular 6 state region.
So as you might suspect, what is being considered today is of great interest to us. I had the educational opportunity to be an alternate to Carol Hunter from PAW on the Reg Neg Committee and was able to attend a couple of the sessions and it was quite enlightening. It’s quite a process.
We have a couple of concerns before I turn it over to Rob for some practical feedback that he has, which is: We would encourage the Access Board to move along as quickly as you can, so that these standards will apply to those entities covered by the ADA.
We certainly have concerns that initially it is just to the federal agencies that will, as I understand it, enable this to go through the legislative process a bit faster, but we do hope that this will be pushed down to a greater number of folks.
As the Access Board does issue all of these guidelines, we would encourage you to create those collateral materials, like you have done for the ADAAG. The toilet stalls, accessible routes, things of that nature.
We as an information center find those things absolutely invaluable. And so we hope that those materials will become available.
I’m going to turn it over to Rob now.
ROB GILKERSON: I just have a couple of comments. The first one, my first concern is applying the trail guidelines to highly developed bike and pedestrian paths that are generally paved, asphalt, or packed crusher fines. I believe the proposed guidelines do not provide the level of accessibility expected for these areas. Maybe we’re better off just using the AASHTO guide for development of bike facilities for these types of trails, or pulling out it altogether and put it into public rights of way.
My other concern is with trail obstacles. I would like the following to be added underneath an exception or an advisory, and basically read something like this: “Where tread obstacles traverse the full width of the trail, like a root or water bar, then tread obstacles must be at least 48 inches apart.” And I’ll show you why that’s important here just in a second.
Pat’s got some pretend tread obstacles that are 2 inches high for me out front here. When tread obstacles are back to back like this (inaudible) first off (inaudible) stuck on the second one (Speaker is off microphone). (inaudible) stop on there and this is a real concern when you’re going up a hill. You might be able to pop a wheelie and go over them both at the same time but as you’re going up a hill, it’s more and more difficult. That’s why I’m suggesting 48 inches between the two. And if you need to power over it one wheel at a time, not that big of a deal. So those are my suggestions. Pat, do you have anything else?
PAT GOING: One other on our wish list would be that the Access Board would consider some on line training opportunities and other educational outreach that everybody could take advantage of.
ROB GILKERSON: Thank you.
PHILIP PEARCE (BOARD MEMBER): Thank you. Any of the members on the board have a question for them? Joe Cirillo?
JOSEPH CIRILLO (BOARD MEMBER): I don’t have a question, but if you’re waiting for the board to go through its whole process and make this applicable to states, et cetera, I could save you the time. The state of Rhode Island, before many of the things were applicable to state projects or local projects, we adopted it as by the state adopting the regulations as something we wanted the state or the local government to do in our building code or our state law.
So it’s possible to do likewise. You don’t need a federal mandate to do it. You need it if you really want it in your locality, it doesn’t have to be a federal mandate.
PAT GOING: All right. Thank you very much.