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I am writing in support of the concept and implementation of both accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings. As a blind person who has traveled extensively around the United States, I value these features that provide me with the same access to information about my environment as printed signage and visual features do for sighted pedestrians.

I lost the majority of my sight at age 19 and underwent standard, state-funded rehabilitation where I had approximately 12 weeks of orientation and mobility training. During this time, I was taught how to incorporate accessible pedestrian signals into my travel skill set. This training in 1983 made use of rudimentary audible signals that often covered up sounds of turning traffic. My instructor was very quick to note that no one should rely solely on the sound of a buzzer or bell to know when it was safe to cross any street with such a signal. He trained all of his students, as did other orientation and mobility instructors in this facility, to listen to traffic flow before, during and after the audible signal to determine when it was safe to enter and complete a crossing. He also explained the value of knowing at which point in the signal, as indicated by the audible buzzer, it was safe for all pedestrians to cross.

My travel skills literally grew with the development of audible and tactile signal technology but at no time did they rely primarily on the presence of that technology for proper street crossing. That is, until recently.

At age 22 I trained with my first guide dog and have worked with 5 dogs over the subsequent years. The key to working successfully with a guide dog is being an active part of a team. My job in street crossings is to know when to command the animal into the street. Then we both must listen and the dog must actively watch traffic as we complete our crossing. For years, this was possible at most intersections without the aid of an accessible signal. Where such signals were present though, they aided me in more accurately kno wing when to command my dog into the street, thus giving us both more confidence about completing the crossing safely.

In the past 5 years, intersection design and street layout has changed to accommodate more and more cars. I have noticed just in my travel around Columbus, Ohio that the number of lanes and patterns of traffic are not as easy to read as in past years. Traffic management features such as wide, rounded curbs for turning lanes, round-abouts and "porkchop islands" have made the act of approaching a corner, lining up with parallel traffic and making a straight street crossing more and more difficult.

I think of myself as a good traveler. I am now totally blind and have traveled alone to Australia and throughout this country. I feel I have had appropriate training from rehabilitation professionals and have read about new traffic situations such as those mentioned above and about the rules of actuated intersections, "claiming the intersection" and other pedestrian issues. In other words, I am not in need of any training simply to use my environment. What I am in need of is information.

I need to know when I as the pedestrian have the "walk sign." I need to know where the actual pedestrian crosswalk is when not located at a 90-degree angled corner. I need to know if I am approaching an area with a dangerous edge, such as a train or subway platform or loading dock in a parking structure. These are not things sighted pedestrians have to undergo special training to know about. They simply look up at signs or see the features as part of the environment. For me, accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings are as simple as visual cues for sighted pedestrians. They do not involve further training by specific organizations on my part, just a means of providing the same information sighted people receive.

It is crucial for people who work with guide dogs not only to understand and use the orientation and mobility cues already present, such as traffic sounds and contextual layout of outdoor spaces, train and subway stations, etc., but to have other information about how to navigate. The dog, contrary to popular fiction, does not do all of the work of getting the team from one place to another. The guide dog is analogous to a smart automobile in that I must steer it and get it moving in a certain direction, but it automatically avoids all of the potholes and other cars in its way without me having to direct it.

Due to the complex nature of traffic today, many dogs working in urban environments are "burning out" earlier and earlier. Why? Because their human partner has less and less information with which to support them when entering streets, causing the dog to make more decisions on its own. Over time, this vigilance to traffic and need to make quick decisions takes its toll on a dog.

We as guide dog handlers also can suffer serious lapses in confidence when constantly faced with traffic situations that we cannot interpret, such as the multi-phase intersection, rounded curbs, crossing halfway down a block to accommodate a round-about design, etc.

Rather than making us more independent, this frustration over lack of information about such streets and other areas tends to cause people not to travel for fear of finding themselves at a situation they cannot interpret safely. This fear leads to a dependence on paratransit and other services once thought not to be needed by blind people with functional travel skills.

I have had the honor and pleasure over the past ten years of interacting with hundreds of blind people around the United States, and corresponding via email with thousands more around the world. We all value our independence and inclusion in society. That independence and inclusion takes many forms. The one thing we cannot deny though is that the built environment is becoming far more complex than what most of us learned to handle in our initial orientation and mobility training. Blind children today have the advantage of being able to incorporate many new travel skills, including the appropriate use of accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings.

Over the same ten year period, I have also seen very poorly designed and implemented accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings, embodying all of the features their critics detest. Like poorly printed or contrasted signage for sighted people, poorly designed accessible signals that are too loud, easily confused with environmental sounds such as birds or not located in appropriate places for people to activate them and return to the beginning of the crosswalk to cross a street, are dangerous and detract from the area as a whole and its use by everyone, not just blind people.

When saying that I support the concepts of accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings, I mean that I support their appropriate implementation, with consideration to the surrounding area and use patterns, but not taking one individual's or organization's point of view as the sole arbiter of that community in their installation. No single organization can possibly represent all people with a given distinction. Making intersections and platforms safe for everyone, not just the prototypical blind person, elderly person or child, should be the goal of any civil engineer and city.

I end by relating 2 stories of the importance of accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings in my life.

My husband and I are both legally blind. We both work with guide dogs. We live in a standard, housing subdivision in a suburban area of Columbus, Ohio. Bordering our subdivision are 2 arterial roads that come together at a four-way intersection. This intersection has fairly rounded corners and carries a very high volume of traffic at peak periods. There are no sidewalks leading along these arterial roads or at the intersection.

Across the other three sides of this intersection, small businesses form the core of services we can readily reach on foot. These places include a pharmacy, veterinary clinic, dry cleaner and restaurant. When requesting accessible pedestrian signals for this very complex and often very busy intersection with actuated signals, several configurations of turning cycles and approximately 1.5 to 3 miles of non-stop roadway before reaching the intersection, we were told that only the leg we traveled most would or could be made accessible. This necessitates that we be particularly alert at reading traffic. This is not normally a problem but because we do not have reliable access to information about this intersection's changing walk cycle, we simply do not attempt to cross there during peak traffic times, thus limiting our access to those businesses.

The accessible signal at this intersection is a loud buzzer, nothing like the newer, more discrete signals. It is only activated when a pedestrian presses the button for crossing, something that luckily must not be done to actually give a walk sign, but is done as an afterthought by many people crossing here on foot.

In this neighborhood, no one walks outside of the well-kept sidewalks of the subdivisions. They rarely are seen on foot along the arterials. There is, however, a high population of school-aged children, grades K through 12. These children must cross at this and other intersections in the area. When observing who actually did press the button to get the accessible signal recently, we noticed that all of the children pressed the button. They had been taught to do so by their parents and teachers, we discovered, in part because the sound of the signal was thought to alert drivers to look for pedestrians and also that sound brought children who were not paying attention to visual signals back to the business of crossing the street.

These children do not need any special training at an organization to cross the street. They are able to do so more safely because of an accessible pedestrian signal, the same signal that makes it much safer for me to cross this intersection. Could I cross without the signal? Yes, but it is much more stressful.

Regarding detectable warnings, during training with my current guide dog in New York City, we worked in the subway system. On prior training trips to the subway, my past dogs had picked up on my fear of falling or misjudging the distance to the edge of the platform. Although we as teams are taught to walk with the dog between us and the edge of the platform, I often feared inadvertently pushing my dog off that edge into a sometimes 8-foot deep pit. This made me very reluctant to use the subway during business trips to New York and Washington DC. This angered me as I thought of myself as a confident traveler who knew, in general, the design of such places and who could, academically, handle them.

It was such a relief and pleasure to travel recently in the New York City and Washington DC subway systems with their detectable warning strips along the platforms. I no longer felt the stress of knowing exactly where that edge was. I could relax and my dog could relax and do its work. I observed other people walking along the platform, obviously not looking at their surroundings, being caught up short upon feeling the tactile warning. Several during my trips even exclaimed at being so close to the platform edge. I can only assume they were reading or otherwise looking at something other than their feet or the platform and would have fallen into the pit without this warning strip. These people had neither cane nor guide dog.

Properly installed and maintained accessible pedestrian signals and detectable warnings, used with common sense in design and placement blend easily into the environment and become second nature, features everyone looks for and uses, not something that separates blind people or distinguishes us in a negative way. Without these simple methods of gaining information about the environment, many blind people do not travel and are not as mobile as they could be, increasing the load on social service and government agencies. It's not about more training. It's about more information.

The old saying about giving a man a fish and him eating for a day applies here. I already know how to "fish." I just need a fishing pole.

Jenine Stanley