Category: transit

Accessible Futures discussions

Posted on by Liz Henry

Earlier this week I went to the Metropolitan Regional Commission’s Accessible Futures conference and had a great time being in community with so many badass disabled folks & talking with people from all over the Bay Area who work in transit. The main track for the conference was on transit, and there were other discussions on housing, employment, and climate. I want to give a high level summary and maybe a few critiques along the way (shocker!)

The MTC was created by the California Legislature in 1970 to plan, finance and coordinate the Bay Area’s transportation systems, and now includes other regional issues, including housing and development. They get funding from many sources, including 700 million/year in bridge tolls, and distribute or help move over 1 billion per year to other agencies. 9 counties! Many cities and towns! I think 27 different transit agencies too!

In short, what they are, who they are, and what they do is super complicated!

I enjoyed hearing the presentation of MTC’s 4 year plan. Here is a PDF of it: https://mtc.ca.gov/sites/default/files/documents/2024-12/MTC-Coordinated-Plan-2024.pdf.pdf They sound committed to improving accessibility and are starting with a unified design for signage and wayfinding across all the regions and forms of public transit.

several powerchair users facing the conference speaker Dr victor pineda

Each section of the day’s discussions kicked off with a sort of panel of people with related expertise or experience. Often that was simply a short self-introduction and then the rest of the time was taken up by carrying the mic around to us in the ‘audience’ of other participants.

This worked well enough to get ideas flowing and people talking. But I would have liked to hear more thoughts and discussion from the panelists. Or if we were going to hear from everyone in the room, just do it round robin style and give everyone an opportunity to introduce themselves and their work or experiences, and to speak further. We had the time!

My impression of the most important points raised in the transit track:

1) Defragmentation of services
Reliable, same day scheduling, with single-seat rides, are a big goal.

Moving across “regions” is an expensive, confusing experience for disabled people on public transit. Paratransit users have many inequities in services. That is, rather than scheduling a ride a day or more in advance, then having to transfer to a different paratransit agency/vehicle because you are going from one city to another or one county to another. As an imperfect solution, having subsidized ride-hailing (Uber/Lyft/Waymo) rides can improve things quite a lot for disabled riders’ experiences.

2) Equitable fares.

Everyone should have reasonable costs to get from point A to point B. Paratransit users are still facing unequal costs depending on the region or municipality they are traveling in. We pay more, and we get less, or worse, service in many cases.

3) Respect for our time and agency.

This is somewhat nebulous, but many of the pain points I heard articulated from the crowd hinged on disrespect for our time.
* The timing on paratransit rides often doesn’t work, as drivers arrive early or late. A paratransit ride might be shared with someone else so scheduling is imprecise to start with and we can only book a goal for either pickup, or dropoff, time but not both.
* A blind person trying to get schedule information shouldn’t have to wrestle for 10 minutes with a PDF to find out when the next train is when a sighted person can glance at a display.
* A wheelchair or walker user gets off BART where there are elevators at both ends of the platform (19th St. Oakland I’m looking at you) from the platform to the concourse, but only one side has an elevator to the street, so if you pick the wrong one you have to traverse an entire city block underground, twice.

We have jobs, appointments, school, picking up our kids, and so on to get to. Wasting our time is huge inequity that makes it hard for us to be integrated into the life of the society around us.

4) Respect and communication in general

Many people described bad experiences that could improve through better and consistent training for all transit staff. This should also mean an accessible and usable complaint process that provides information and feedback to the person filing the complaint.

5. Removing barriers
– or continuing to remove them. For example increasing level boarding opportunities and ramps. Ramps don’t break (or at least, not as fast as lifts and elevators do.) Designing new infrastructure so that it doesn’t have obvious weak points. Multimodal points of communication for things like schedules, stops, and navigation for blind, Deaf, hard of hearing, Deaf-blind, IDD folks, and others.

6) Disaster planning

I got the sense that the conference runners felt that disaster planning was out of scope for our discussions about transit, while many participants had strong feelings it WAS a transit planning issue. We see over and over that when a disaster strikes, able bodied people evacuate while disabled and elderly people are left to die. And the responsibility for planning for these situations is left to us individually, who may have the fewest resources to turn to. Is this regional transit’s problem? Not them alone but it would be helpful of course if transit had more capacity to transport disabled people as seamlessly as it can everyone else.

Given those points we raised, how can our convening help or influence the decisions that city government, transit agencies, and others make in the future?

As the organizers or more precisely the various consultants they hired to facilitate the conference repeatedly asked, But what about NEXT STEPS? Look, obviously the next steps are complicated and to start making them we would need to understand the giant web of funding, regulations, paratransit agency procurement policies, and local politics of every governmental body in the Bay Area.

When you bring together a lot of disabled people to talk about things like transit and housing, you are going to get complaints and demands that may not slot into what is possible from the political landscape so this process needs to be heavily 2 way.

The wayfinding and signage consolidation plan actually sounded reasonably good to me, like, an obvious improvement for a huge number of people.

The most positive stories I heard from people were about paratransit moving to ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft. Feelings are very mixed as we are aware of the bad labor practices of these companies and the climate effects of continuing to commit to “car first culture”. AND YET. Everyone speaking up who mentioned these programs said that they were LIFE CHANGING. For the first time in someone’s life having access to on demand transportation that comes with some (even if inadequate) structure. We can assert that, I think, and also help to fight for the rights of the drivers to decent treatment and a living wage.

Some cities like Richmond and I think Hayward have programs where if you qualify for paratransit you can use it to take Uber (or Lyft?) which in THEORY includes a wheelchair accessible vehicle or WAV. You pay a small cost like $3 per ride, then the local govt. picks up some amount over that, and anything extra over a cap (say, $19) the rider pays out of pocket.

I shared many positive examples during the discussions and in personal conversations – here’s two I can remember:

1) For years I reported a particular very terrible and unsafe curb cut, in a busy part of downtown, via the SF 311 app. Finally, someone from SFMTA contacted me via email and I think we may have even had a call, and they shared a very fascinating spreadsheet with me, that listed all the curb cut complaints they have gathered, with details like cost estimates to fix, travel in that intersection, and the availability of alternate routes of travel. That act of sharing data — that should or couse be, I think, public data! — turned my frustration and anger to a feeling of wanting to collaborate and help, as well as understanding how the agency was making decisions about priorities.

2) Over the last several years (maybe 5 or 10, honestly I can’t be more precise) SF MUNI bus drivers have gotten better and better at handling wheelchair using and other disabled riders. I mean me, but also my observations of their interactions with other riding with me in the front of the bus. It used to be, out of a 4 bus journey across town, ie going somewhere and back with 1 transfer, one out of those 4 rides would try my very soul and I would end up sad and enraged at how I was treated (or how others were treated too of course). That has VASTLY improved and I’d put it more like 1 out of 30 rides being super enraging and maybe a few more having some point of normal frustration. It’s so, so much better. I don’t feel the drivers are angry and hostile, they don’t seem to be worrying too much about the time it takes to deploy the ramp, they don’t pass me up as often, and so on. Notably, they are way more proactive to get other riders to cram in or move if the front of the bus is crowded. And they have stopped (mostly) scolding and yelling at me about what they think I am supposed to be doing. (Like, where I wait to board the bus, or even, whether I SHOULD be riding the bus at a busy time of day.)

And, I also told stories one on one about my experiences actually trying to hail and use an Uber, Lyft, and Waymo WAV (wheelchair accessible vehicle). When it works, it works. When it doesn’t you have no recourse. I can take a (free, currently) Waymo WAV within the boundaries of San Francisco, despite the almost non-functional “app” – which lacks info about who is coming and where they are and their ETA — usually, they arrive in 20-25 minutes as for some reason they are always parked in Marina Green, a place I never go on the far side of town across maximum traffic. I can get a costly (price gouging disabled people) Uber, FROM San Francisco, in maybe 10-15 minutes pickup time, to go across the Bay to Richmond to visit my parents, but then I won’t be able to get back because their coverage just doesn’t exist (it will promise it’s connecting you with a WAV, then it doesn’t.) And, their rear loading vans put a wheelchair user in a very weird position, basically at a steep angle lying on my back since I roll up the ramp and then stay … on a steeply tilted ramp. It is unacceptably uncomfortable to me. (No staff of the transit agencies had ever heard these complaints?!) Lyft sometimes has an OK experience but mostly lacks coverage and availability. (Wild that these stories were news to anyone…)

This leads me to my next point which is that when you get a lot of us in the room to talk about this stuff you are asking us to talk about stuff that is actually traumatic. So the direction the discussion goes is often “freaked out trauma dump”. It is unavoidable.

We have to navigate that up front. It is a fairly intense request to ask people to process traumatic experiences (this comes up a lot with health care for example) and then to immediately come up with systemic solutions. They don’t really go well together, you need to acknowledge that dredging it up is painful (even harmful) and make some point of transition to talking about things in a different way. Not just like, some able bodied consultant facilitators going, “OK well enough with the list of grievances, how about the next steps?!” Dude. No.

Disabled, or let’s say, disability justice informed, organizers would not have been so unfeeling and would have held space for our intense feelings, our rage, our fear, our sadness, and hold out hope for solidarity and healing.

My final point, I think, is about the end of the conference which was framed as taking some of the “notes” or points from the 2 days of discussion, and using them to write a group “Resolution”. Like a political statement beginning, Resolved, we the undersigned, affirm our fundamental right and demand blah blah.”

There were so many problems with how this was approached.

First, I am sorry to be harsh, but the document given to us as the draft of the Resolution was like someone, or some AI, took an assortment of bullet points and made them into sentences with no logical relationship of one point to another, nothing given emphasis or weighted, and barely readable. I love a semi-colon, but Christ! It was a giant list in “prose” that as an English composition college professor I would have given a D or maybe a C-.

Then, this document was handed out to us as 24 pages of large print text , or a qr code where we could get a PDF. Then someone tried reading it out loud line by line asking for “edits” or commentary after each sentence.

That is not a viable way to edit or write a document collaboratively!!!

And I am not sure what anyone thinks would then happen to that document. No government official is going to wade through all that. At best some mayor’s office intern is going to pipe the PDF into an AI to summarize it in bullet points.

We could have each written (with assistance if needed) maybe 3-5 points we wanted included, put them on actual post it notes and shove it up on a white board. Not ideal access but better collaborative construction of ideas. And then giving us time to both contribute those points (after the conference!) and to have space to read and comment on any document created from them. For accessibility, it isn’t gonna happen in real time.

Then when Melissa sitting next to me (from TheARC) asked about plain language translation, the facilitators didn’t have a clue what that even meant.

I had serious, serious doubts about, well, what to me looked like LLM generated sections of the document. If I’m right about that, I think it was both unnecessary and inappropriate.

It was unclear what was going on, overall. A discussion, yes. A group construction of an advocacy platform? Feedback to the MTC on their plan? Suggestions for the next 4 year plan? In what way did this actually result in some sort of engagement in a democratic government process? (Unclear to me but I am a noob in this space so bear with me.)

It was kind of sad to see this fizzling end to the day, pulling out all the joy, momentum, and sense of connection I had felt compared to the rest of the conference which was very nice and conducive to good conversations. I have a slightly better idea of what kinds of advocacy and oversight and planning agencies and committees are out there, that I might join if I have the time (or pay) to work on these issues directly.

Overall, I’m so glad that I went and participated. The goal was to dream big and make connections, and I think we all succeeded in that even if it didn’t translate to a “political document” about what we “want”. I put “want” in quotes because, We don’t need a new manifesto to assert the rights we as disabled people already have in law.

powerchair user with BART totebag on the back of her chair, and her seated partner, looking at conference speaker victor pineda

Poesía hangout; bus stop philosophy

Posted on by Liz

A sunny cafe table at 18th and Castro – Sun’s out, buns out fully in force – I remove 3 layers of clothing from the chilly morning – A delicious salmon foccacia sandwich and the wifi password – pride flags flutter in the mild breeze – Conversations at neighboring table wafting towards me – they do not APPRECIATE my paintings, they are MEAN to me – they didn’t HANG THEM how i said – the DEYOUNG – I side eye over to the irked artist and her sounding board – cute boys with white beards quietly sip their coffee, one of them in a men’s dress shirt with spangled epaulettes – As the youth say – the vibes were impeccable.

colorful art nouveau poster taped onto a light pole of a sexy masked lady in a bustier and red stockings for an event called fancy pants

I did a lot of fiddly online things setting up stuff for my nonprofit, GOAT. And wrote lists of more stuff to do, and drafted posts and emails and emailed people and did all that kind of stuff. No poetry was written today (alas) in Poesía. I stuffed extra dollars in the tip jar for table rent.

Earlier – I tried to buy some flowers on 24th street and thought “Oh a bargain, 7 dollars” but then surprise, they were 84 dollars. What?! What the fuck? Absolutely not. (the “7” was merely an internal store code?) No flowers for me!

My brother in law texted me from the beach and I invited him to join me at the cafe, so then we had a lot of discussion of things like engineering meeting practices and what happens in the work life of a Principal engineer, what we might do someday if we retire, the intricate fucked up politics of our various families, and of course (because I was thinking about it) blogs. Lua was mentioned – Scheme – I suggested he might like looking at Spritely (goblins?)–

We drank two large bottles of water in an interestingly striped glass, striped sideways so when you look through the bottle, you see the stripes intersect and cross the stripes on the other side of the bottle, and I thought about how to do that myself maybe with some sort of calligraphic paint pen and a long narrow stencil cutout – Imperfectly.

I got my nephew an enamel pin in Cliff’s Variety for his half birthday and got myself sparkly bobby pins. It doesn’t matter how butch or masc I go – DO NOT LAUGH – I swear to god I’m so masc – I am GLAM BUTCH – like David Bowie if he wore sparkling barrettes – SHUT UP !!!!!!

:: shoots cuffs foppishly ::

On the 24 bus on the way home it was quite crowded as it always is at the end of the day – Full of school kids and people coming back from shopping or the sutter hospital – And a somewhat frail older lady stood in front of me and I explained I was going to brace my foot on the bit of the turned-up seat so she should not be alarmed or think I was rudely sticking my foot up; we were about to go up and down a roller coaster of hills and without my foot bracing me, me and my 100 lbs of powerchair would squash her like a bug despite the “brakes being on”.

(There are no brakes, it is a solenoid thingie that kicks in when the chair’s power is off but people don’t understand that so I just agree that “the brakes are on”. )

She asked me (not to be rude) in a few different (rude) ways what was wrong with me – was i born this way or was it a disease – You know what this lady was extremely visibly ancient and I give a free pass to people too old to have a filter on their mouths and I like talking on the bus anyway and I am not in the mood to be pissy to any human being who isn’t a fucking nazi, so I mildly turned away her questions with INCREDIBLE SOCIAL JUJITSU.

She then said that life is hard for all of us! you can’t always tell but really that’s just how life is ! for everyone! it comes to us all! I agreed and commented further. She said, there is a quote she likes by a Spanish philosopher (I already knew who it was gonna be, do you?) It was something about being Lost – she wishes she knew the name – Naturally I whip out my phone (already in hand b/c Pokemon Go loves the bus) “Oh! You are – of course the Young people – the google – ?!” I nodded – I was indeed going to young people internet google the shit out of her quote. Oh, to be in the incredulous bewilderment, in the fog, expectant, as the “young people” do things quickly in front of us. It will come to us someday – You young people and your brain fungus hijinks – zapping everything – I just can’t get used to it!

I then show her Jose Ortega y Gassett’s wikiquote page and read her a few zingers. “We cannot put off living until we are ready.” “Life is fired at us point blank.” Oh! I think she liked that. We parted fast friends at 24th and Castro, with a handshake, smiles, and an exchange of names.

Pokétears

Posted on by Liz

Logged into Pokémon today to send gifts to my friends’ kids. It isn’t so much fun to play it when I’m not out running around town, getting interesting pokestop gifts to send, catching weird creatures, and hatching eggs. As I then used up the rest of my hoard of gifts on other friends I felt weepy. I miss riding the bus all over town, I miss the J Church, I miss BART, feeling free & intermeshed with the map and all the people of the city.

Sent a gift to some random neighbor whose name I don’t remember but who is a tech journalist and travels around a lot (good gifts from other countries!). We met on the street as I caught him and his partner battling a gym (at the library). Sent another to my pal “yeetrio”, a young man who approached me on the platform at BART since he spotted me playing – we’re ultra friends and nearly to “best friends” months later. I saw him go to Costa Rica and then come back again! Sent one to my dad who is my top Lucky Friend. I can tell he has gone out to do his rounds in the back of Huntwick (Huntwick Stump Bear!) and Meyer Park in Houston.

It is always sweet when someone sends me an obviously cool gift (I’m looking at you Denise and Tarrant but also whoever keeps sending me “Midnight Rollergirl”.

Animal Crossing continues – today I made nearly 1 million on the stalk market by selling my turnips on someone’s island from a discord channel. The fellowship on there is very sweet as well. Sumana and Leonard and I keep visiting each other’s islands to admire the decor and flowers and trade tips.

Feeling sentimental about games – I need to gear up to work on my big game again but it has obviously taken on a different feeling now. It is set in the Before Times, but it’s actually about history and time travel and change as the Traveller deepens their knowledge of the time and place they’re in (and goes back & forward in time as well.) So, I guess that’s where my feelings about the pandemic and our city will go.

Day 2 in Quito

Posted on by Liz

Today I wandered north through some parks, and then to some kind of marketplace for crafts which felt like 200 booths all selling the same exact stuff. I bought some tiny pouches and a stuffed guinea pig made of alpaca wool (for the cat). I ended up at a water park (where I had some delicious street food) and then the Jardín Botánico which was great but almost completely empty of people. I spent a while in the orchid house then at the bonsai exhibit, and then took the C1 Trolebus back to the Plaza Teatro near our hotel. That may not sound like a lot but for me it was a fairly intense experience since I have to pay a ridiculous amount of attention to the pavement. (An opportunity to feel smug triumph at every single street crossing.)

I ended up going down Guayaquil again around 4pm – past the gauntlet of young women offering ice cream and the stream of every single person walking by holding an ice cream cone. I had just bought a pastry as big as my face at random from a street vendor and it turned out to be full of pineapple which is my favorite so I was spared the pressure to have ice cream too. Everyone holding the ice cream or one of the huge pastries would give a little nod of shared satisfaction with the afternoon. I had wondered yesterday if the “stroll around the plaza eating pastries” custom was just on Sundays but no it seems to be every day. It’s great.

Past the Plaza Grande going down Venezuela, I noticed a huge long ramp winding down to La Ronda which is supposed to be a cool street to visit. So, I took the ramp but it ended in a plaza with no way to get out except from a bunch of stairs. Back up the ramp! And then I was in such luck because coming out of Plaza Grande was a fabulous parade.

Marching bands, dancers in costumes, women holding candles in what was probably a religious way, little kids in fancy dresses, etc. A good parade! I especially liked the grotesque comedy dancing police.

I am scoping out cafes and restaurants and shops where I can get in (not many!!) Found a level entrance grocery (Tía of Central Quito) and a pharmacy (for cold meds and kleenex for Danny). Most shops have a steep step up or down to get in and I cannot leave my powerchair in the street so, no go. My best bet for cafes is anywhere that has outdoor seating on a plaza. The restaurants near Teatro Bolivar look pretty good so I might head there today. I have seen nowhere with people doing laptop things in a public place San Francisco cafe style (sadly, since that’s what I feel like doing right now)

I have to tell the story of using the Trolebus. Google Maps is not super helpful though it does show the stops. Maybe there is a local app for the trolleys (Trolebus, Ecovia, and Metro lines though each of those has sub-routes I don’t understand yet.) These are just regular large buses, the long kind with flexible sections in between cars, but you board from a glassed in platform, paying up front at a little booth. It’s like, 15 or 25 cents or something, very cheap. Some platforms have an exit side and an entrance side, and the exit side has those revolving iron things that won’t let a wheelchair through so you have to exit out the entrance (potentially assisted by a guard). The entrance is a turnstile but you can fold one of the turnstile prongs down to get your wheelchair past it. The bus itself at least on this first ride did not pull up very close to the platform so I had a huge gap to go over. Fortunately I have huge tires and i thought it looked JUST possible so I gunned it and jumped the gap. People around me conferred and one guy offered to help which i accepted and so by the time I was positioned to make my death defying LEAP about 4 people’s hands were on the chair just in case. (Very kind actually!) The bus was crowded but no worse than San Francisco at rush hour (nicer, really). And the same young studenty-looking man and his girlfriend made sure to let me know the right stop to get off at and helped clear the decks for my dramatic backwards exit. Was any of this wise? MAYBE NOT. Tune in maybe tomorrow when I will attempt to ride the bus again to some random destination!

On the way back to my hotel around 5:30 I stopped to get the last bit of sun in San Blas Plaza and maybe catch a pokemon (I am sending Ecuador Pokégifts to everyone!) A little kid maybe 5 or 6 years old was riding his bike around the plaza & he came up to me to ask about my chair. I explained the controls to go faster or slower on one side, the battery life, and the joystick (I said “palanca” because i have no idea what the right word is, and that seems to suffice) And then he patted my lap and said “can i drive” and unceremoniously climbed up into my lap. That was unexpected and slightly weird but also a lot of fun — I like small children. I worried what his attendant grownups would think but no one swooped down on us. He drove us around and around the plaza with us both giggling until I said I had to go. “Es muy divertido!” he said as we shook hands and exchanged names. My theory is that maybe he has a relative who is a wheelchair user and, well, no boundaries because he is 5 years old and very brave and confident.

Meanwhile Danny and his colleagues are meeting up with people in support of Ola Bini who as near as I can tell was bizarrely scapegoated just for being the sort of nerd who likes crypto and uses Linux and Tor. Hello… that would be like, nearly every open source engineer I work with…. People misunderstand hacker culture so badly.

The Hostility of the Helper

Posted on by Liz

When others perceive us (disabled people) as being in need of help there can be a strange dynamic in play. They deny our agency, our perspective, seeing us as an obligation. They are forced, in their minds, to hold the door open or tie down our wheelchairs or grab our arm unexpectedly and try to steer us up the steps, forced by their concept of what is proper and even moral. It’s the right thing to do. They’re prepared to do their duty. “No, thank you” isn’t a possible answer to their concept of dutiful helping. The dark side of their duty is anger. They’re already mad, before we respond in any way to defuse or exacerbate the situation. Pre-loaded with dehumanizing forces. The undercurrent of hostility can poison the respectful interdependence that is possible between any people. They will perform their duty, and we the helped will perform gratitude. For survival, sometimes we have to accept hostile, angry, disrespectful help. I wonder how others think about this and how they keep their equilibrium, a philosophical distance or perspective maybe, and either move on or are able to change the Helper’s minds. The compliance that makes us one of the good ones while we may be burning with fury. It is no different from what most of humanity has to go through and most of us will meet it as we age.

In contrast, how much I appreciate open-hearted kindness. Moments of being treated just regular, without fuss, being seen, heard, listened to, being a person. Those moments wherever we find them from friends, family, people in our communities, or strangers, are a healing antidote, for us to treasure & keep in our core, against the hatred of people whose cruelty we have to swallow. What helped last night? The kindness of a “just regular folks” bus driver acting decent. Chatting with someone about their baby on the elevator. Hip hop dancers on the train. Reading Mc’s bus poems. Art and culture and . . . I’d maybe call it manners . . . all indescribably precious.

Visit to Richmond BART station

Posted on by Liz

Today I voyaged to Richmond BART! It was very exciting!

It’s an aboveground platform with a large concourse underneath. Amtrak also comes here! Right next to the BART platform, across a nicely landscaped garden with trees, the California Zephyr pulled up with tremendous clanging and excitement. You get to the Amtrak platform from the concourse level using a separate elevator. (I am already planning wild trips to Truckee, Fresno, and Elko, Nevada.)

A giant mural/sculpture by our old friend, William Mitchell, is in the concourse level. It’s bright greeny-blue and reddish orange, wild and glistening. It is supposed to evoke underwater sea life and also something Aztec, but it also made me think of shell mounds and of a giant lizard. You can get right up to it and feel its smooth, weird shapes.

Long sloping ramps and an elevator in a large distinctive red structure at the station’s east entrance. A bit like the prow of a ship. Orange California Poppies blooming in the sun.

To the east there were several little Mexican/Central American markets. You are not going to find a coffee shop or a latte within a couple miles of here but you can get good groceries. It reminded me of neighborhoods I grew up in, in Detroit.

Downtown is half a mile to the east, an easy scoot or walk. The Civic Center, which includes an auditorium, is big, spacious, deserted looking at 2pm, and very red-bricky; the library is pleasant. I browsed their shelves and found a good collection of Native American history and literature books. (Research for Transitory.) Lots that isn’t in the SFPL system. There is an elevator to the 2nd floor, to get to it, you have to get the nice librarians to let you behind their circulation desk.

And their Seed Lending Library is very good! I took a Cupcake Papaver somniferum poppy packet and some Golden Sweet Pea that has pretty flowers that you can eat. Best use of little card catalogue style drawers… intriguing to open and riffle through. I have some seeds in envelopes that I could bring to donate next time.

seed library drawers

ON the west side of the station there is an interesting nook or two, one with a terraced hanging garden and the other with a bench underneath three big murals of the history of Richmond, On the Right Track by Daniel Galvez and Jos Sances. I liked the murals themselves and underneath each one there was a bas relief sculpture of different trains throughout the region’s history including a Pullman car, one carrying the Bay Hippo, a car carrying a ship or a submarine, a fruit and veggie car, a car with a mariachi band and a jazz band, and finally an Amtrak and a BART car! It’s so adorable! I wish it were lower down so it would be easier for people to see all the details.

Check this out, the west entrance of the station. Looks like a spaceport doesn’t it?

richmond train station

To the west of the station, looked like a public housing project but a pretty nice one. Like, they tried to make it nice to be in. There were places to sit and this is also where you’ll find the convenience store most handy to the train station. There are some small colorful decorations along the walkway down Nevin street, iron railings kind of like the papel picado railings around the 16th and Mission BART stairwells. I didn’t go much further but sat and ate some chips in the sun. There was a big transit center here as well with very good maps showing places you could go on various buses. I was tempted to take the 72 bus to the Richmond Ferry (which in the library, I learned was the former Ellis Landing, built amidst huge Huchiun shellmounds. Next time maybe. Need to go back to that library and also try to make it to the Richmond Plunge and Wildcat Canyon.

ON the trip home I also would have liked to visit El Cerrito but the El Cerrito del Norte elevator is out until April 1. I was warned by several people that there is “nothing” to see in El Cerrito but I have my eye on the Ohlone Greenway and the wildflower park in the middle of it.

Almost forgot the “best” part, the quote on a big old display above the entrance to the BART concourse, sponsored by you know who:

Richmond – home of some of the country’s cleanest fuels, lubricating oils, and juicy steak-making propane.

Richmond, home of the most cringeworthy, tone-deaf, awkwardly phrased and most-containing-food-where-it-shouldn’t-be corporate slogans!

Index to all posts describing my BART station visits

Bus poetry

Posted on by Liz

Very excited about this bus poetry project by Mc Allen:

“Some news: I have been given a poetry column in the @BayCity_Beacon. I will write a poem for _every_muni_route_ in San Francisco. If you followed #TotalMuni2018 or #SummerofMuni this will be up your alley.”

I’m so going to show up on Sunday on the sidewalk and check this out. And maybe bring my own Ode to the 14 and the 49 (it needs to be written!)

Anyway …. I just wanna be friends with all the bus poets. So much love!

The logo is so clever, too, it’s the gorgous, swoopy MUNI logo but reworked to get the letters POEM into the swirls!

Epic journey to the south

Posted on by Liz

This morning I took the bus to BART, changed trains in Balboa Park (having a look around as I waited), onward to Millbrae, to Caltrain, then I had thought I was going to take light rail to the Mountainview office but the stop was eliminated in 2015 so I caught a small shuttle bus (happily, accessible.)

I took notes ecstatically on the weird concrete wall patterns (different in every station) and which ones were like deep canyons; the bronze statues in their narrative cement cocoons in Millbrae; which stations were above ground; and lots of notes today and last night about the Ramaytush and other Ohlone people of the areas I was traversing.

Interspersed with Ingress and Pokemon catching it made a pleasant ride. On Caltrain I was even able to work a little bit as it wasn’t crowded and just felt OK to do, while it would seem obnoxious to me on BART. So, in between all that I started the process of releasing Firefox 66 beta 10 and answering bugmail.

Happy hour with some nice people from the office on Castro street – then all the buses and trains in reverse order, this time whenever I wasn’t in tunnels, looking up the art and artists and architects of some of the stations.

Some random observations – the platform floor in Balboa Park is very smooth marble, pleasant to roll across. The Millbrae complex (largest intermodal station west of the Mississippi!) is beautiful if you take a step back from it and admire its soaring winglike structures of steel, glass, and fiberglass.

Also noted: There should be more high density housing on the Peninsula near the BART and Caltrain stations. Some high rise apartments will not ruin your lives, NIMBYs!!

Bus encounter of the day

Posted on by Liz

I got on the bus just before a very old lady with a walker and a fancy hat, as the driver let the ramp down first and it makes more sense to park my chair before her walker, kind of shrugging and smiling a little and she nodded and smiled back. I am so relieved she isn’t annoyed. She is very beautiful, her skin drawn very fine over her high cheekbones. On the bus she asked me some questions about my chair. How much… What was the cause… She would like one maybe but feels she needs the exercise. She has a nice accent, faintly British sounding but African or Caribbean, I can’t tell. I talked about my free tai chi class at the senior center. Another lady got on with a very large wide walker and could not get past. “Mira….” she said, grabbing the first lady’s walker to fold it. “No, you can’t…” The walker was not foldable because the basket underneath was full of stuff including Michele Obama’s book. No, no, I’ll go back here (I slowly trundle further back on the luckily uncrowded bus) and turn around, then there’s room. The first lady didn’t want to scoot down a seat. So the one with the large walker was now able to go around and sit next to her. “What does that mean, Cowwwwwmoooca?” “….?” Comooooooca over there on that sign? I peer around the front of the bus. “Cumaica. I ummmm I don’t think that’s a spanish word it’s probably from some indian language like the name of a place. Maybe it’s Mayan? Or like, sounds more like an um, Taino or Arawak sort of language? I don’t know” THe spanish speaking lady nods when I sum this up as “una palabra de los indios?”. Well you can find out. Tell me what it means. “Ok… ok yeah I can look it up right now. (thumbing my phone) I love the internet. OK uhhh it’s definitely gonna be a place name. Yes! It’s a place in Nicaragua.” But what does it MEAN. I don’t know…. I’d have to dig a little more. Another lady gets on the bus, sparkly eyed, about my age, in a cute scarf. “Oh! You! You are so pretty. You look so familiar. You look beautiful, just like my mother!” “Well what a nice compliment. I like that. Thank you!” “Yes, you could be from my village. It is not really a village but it was. In Ethiopia. Where are your people from?” “I can’t really, we don’t really know a lot but actually I’m researching my geneology and making my family tree. ” “Well you can get the DNA” says the Ethiopian lady. “Yes I’ve been thinking about doing it. I’m going to do it. Did you know you can go to the place, in the East Bay they have a big place, the Mormons, and look up a lot of that history. I don’t know why the Mormons have it but they do.” I chime in. “It’s because they think everyone in their records goes to their heaven.” “They really think that?” “I guess so.” “Well…. huh. ” We all laugh at this.

The Spanish speaking lady with the big walker has to get off the bus. We prepare to do our do-si-do dance in reverse but the bus driver is angry. She is grabbing the Ethiopian lady’s walker but she’s holding onto it tight. “No! You don’t have to do that. She is going to move back there and then she is going around. ” MA’AM…. MA’AM… YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME says the grim bus driver lady. MA’AM YOU HAVE TO LISTEN. We are all arguing with the bus driver and trying to explain we have it under control. The bus driver wrestles the walker away from our dignified friend. “She took it. She didn’t have to do that. Well!” We all look at each other. The lady with the large walker gets off, ducking her head in apology at stirring up a problem. The bus driver gets back onto the bus with the walker. “YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME” she scolds. “YOU SEE HOW EASY THAT WAS? YOU SEE HOW EASY THAT COULD HAVE BEEN? YOU ALMOST GOT THAT LADY FALLING OVER. YOU CAN”T BE TRIPPING THAT OTHER LADY.” “That isn’t how it was, you see, we were going to move back and let her get off.” she said firmly. I spoke up as well and said, that’s how she got on, we just moved for her and it was fine! But, we shrugged and let the driver keep talking. She finally went back to take the wheel. Behind the partition out of her sight, I stick out my tongue like a child, playing to my sympathetic audience so we can get a laugh out of our sadness. “What are you going to do. The truth is the truth.” says our queen. “She has a hard job. But she could have had more respect,” I say. We all laugh kind of like we just did at the Mormons’ database of heaven.

“My mother would like you.” our friend resumed. “The place where my village, not really a village, it is a PROVINCE, well, it was good, and the people were so friendly and good. Well, now, you could not even buy a house, a place just the size of this, this front of the bus, just so little, is 300 thousand dollars! You can’t live there.” “Well…. Someone sure got rich off of that,” I say. “They did, and you know who got rich from it…. ” No… who? “The ones who came to power. They got rich.” We all are thinking on that as the lady my age who looks like the 90 year old Ethiopian lady’s mom gets off the bus waving to us. “I am going to the doctor. The new one isn’t as good, because, they aren’t by the ferry building, so I don’t get as nice of a lunch.” We discuss the pleasures of the Ferry building and then I have to go. Sometimes the ephemeral nature of these bus friendships gets to me. I think that I will have a good old age someday. There will be moments of indignity but also we will have solidarity and a good time.

Coding, swimming, biergarten, chocolate

Posted on by Liz

A really nice day. I worked on my game nearly all day and the time just flew. I’m feeling deeply obsessed! Danny is obsessed with Lisp and Scheme so we are just quietly muttering to ourselves like toddlers doing parallel play.

Yatima took me swimming at the JCC and I did some real laps. First time in a long time too. It’s good going with someone else, it’s just more motivating and feels like nice social time rather than a boring lonely chore. The JCC is pretty nice, especially the locker room which has a sauna and steam room. I steamed, then saunaed. Sauna is my favorite, getting into a sort of dead horse pose with my legs going up the wall, feels great on my ankles.

Then Danny and I went off to Biergarten to hang out with friends and I let all the kids (maybe 8-11 year olds? ) try my powerchair and they were all taking turns zooming around (the bold ones) or cautiously spinning on speed 1 (the shyer ones) It’s fun to see how their faces light up and they are like OMG I’M DRIVING! I’M A ROBOT! WHEEEEE! at 4 miles an hour, which is pretty much how I feel in the chair as well. They were going around the little park there on Octavia and even took it over to get ice cream. Anyway, I thought it was super fun (always have) and it is sort of normalizing disability & mobility stuff and they’re not going to harm anything… they were reasonably cautious and didn’t run anyone over. Really… is there anything nicer than the feeling of indulging children, especially when it is a crowd of benevolent adults looking on all sharing that feeling.

Then Cory taught me a 1 minute physical therapy exercise to detach your nerve fibers from the fascia or something like that, sounds great, fucking bring it because my leg nerve is horrible. Fuck a fascia, fuck a leg nerve, fuck a sciatica, etc. Also every tendon. So we did a weird little leg kicking ankle flexing dance sitting on the picnic table with me going Ow! fuck! ow!!!!! and then notching down my flexing ambitions even for the 1 minute thing. I will be giving it a try (adding it to my pantheon of other one minute exercises which I can invoke while feeling restless or painful). Cannot tell if it just helped or if the buzzing feeling now is OMINOUS and means doom. Always hard to correlate but time will tell.

Home again to deeply contemplate how I can modify the “implicitly pass through other barriers rule” so that my wheelchairs and elevators in the game work together correctly. Danny is in the process of maybe realizing that using gnu stow may do what he was about to write in Lisp. He sounds a little sad about this.

On the bus on the way home I was chatting with a guy in the front of the bus with me (also in a powerchair) and we were like both eyeing each others gear. He and his friend were from Ireland. Then he was like do you like chocolate? Being kind of high (I wasn’t while I was at the bar, but then, figured why not make the bus ride more tolerable…Vape in my pocket…. what the heck) I was like “Oh ummm well yeah, why, is my face covered in ice cream because I was actually just eating chocolate ice cream”. No it was not but he gave me a fancy chocolate bar from Dandelion. As pickup lines go this is a pretty good one and I did not know how to refuse the badass chocolate bar. I mean. Also, he complimented my sexy wheels and told me to share the chocolate with someone I love and I was like Um like maybe my husband who is sitting right there LOL. Now I have this awesome chocolate and we need to be friends but I was too stoned to do anything clever like exchange social media names or whatever, instead, staring at the chocolate bar like a doofus and mumbling. The end!

Oh but one more thing. This flyer from yesterday’ event for Public Domain Day at the Internet Archive, of things created in 1923 newly (re)entering the public domain. It’s a nicely printed large yellow poster or broadsheet by queer.archive.work, with a photo of a sculpture by Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, with a poem by Jean Toomer handwritten over it:

Within this black hive to-night
There swarm a million bees;
Bees passing in and out the moon,
Bees escaping out the moon,
Bees returning through the moon,
Silver bees intently buzzing,
Silver honey dripping from the swarm of bees
Earth is a waxen cell of the world comb,
And I, a drone,
Lying on my back,
Lipping honey,
Getting drunk with that silver honey,
Wish that I might fly out past the moon
And curl forever in some far-off farmyard flower.

I have that book somewhere. It’s a good one!