Changing Vehicles Concern Blind Community
March 27, 2008 10:25 EDT
March 27, 2008--After a blind man is hit by a bus downtown, people from the blind community are speaking out about the accident and their concerns for the future. As the man recovers, other blind people say they're concerned about traffic downtown -- not because of how much there is, but because of how the vehicles are changing.
Navigating downtown Des Moines is no problem for Curtis Chong. The blind man is so good at it he can even tell when the stop light is turning yellow. "Some people come in especially if they're not from the city and they're afraid of standing close to the edge (of the sidewalk)," Chong said.
Most people are taught to look both ways before crossing the street, but imagine if you could only listen both ways. Students at the Iowa Department for the Blind are taught to rely on their ears when it comes to intersections. That's why the popularity of hybrid cars lately has Chong and others quite concerned. "We know hybrid means electric and that is synonymous in our minds with quiet," he said.
Quiet and increasing in size, the Des Moines Area Regional Transit Authority just secured the purchase of the state's first hybrid bus. "It's bad enough I get hit by a hybrid car. Those buses are big, I don't want to get out in front of one of them," Chong said.
Chong and others have been working with DART on a way to alert the blind when a hybrid bus is approaching. As for all the other hybrid vehicles hitting the road these days, Chong says it may be up to lawmakers in Washington to develop a solution.
"We all want the environment to be less noisy, nobody has any quarrel with that. What we don't want is zero noise. We want some indication that tells us what the vehicle is doing," Chong says.
DART says its hybrid bus will not be on the road until next winter, but it is planning to add more hybrids to its fleet in the next few years. The DART bus that hit the blind pedestrian was not a hybrid, and the pedestrian did have the right of way.