As a parent of a 20-yr-old college student, I feel compelled to write concerning the installation of audible traffic signals in communities. First, let me begin by saying, that in the elementary school years, my daughter got absolutely INADEQUATE orientation and mobility from our local school OR intermediate school district to travel either in our own personal neighborhood or the school neighborhood. No matter where she walked, they did not give her even the basics for safe & independent traveling within her own community. Not only did they not build any personal independence skills within our daughter, they didn't put a cane in her hand either.

Thus, between high school and college, she had to take time off of her academic schedule/goals in order to seek out these skills on her own (and at great expense to the taxpayers of our state) in order to be trained to travel independently and get around a college campus. In what I, as well as our daughter, think is the best training center for the blind in our country, she learned to not only travel in the community on her on, but to travel to any other community anywhere....with skills that work at ALL intersections ...from the tiniest town to the biggest, most-congested city in the world. No audible traffic signal can compromise the skills she learned at this center. They work....they're safe, and she continues to use those skills on a daily basis with a very busy class schedule now that she's in college. What I truly worry about is that by installing these types of traffic signals, your masking the greater problem...which is getting blind people the training they need to have the skills to independently travel within (and out of) their communities. To mask that basic skill (with the substitution of a traffic signal) is to deny that, with training & skills, a blind person can be independent enough to cross alleys, intersections, and streets anywhere they wish to travel. Support that....not audible traffic signals.

Sincerely,
Kathleen A. Hilliker