perhaps, heard of elsewhere. The total annual operating budget is $210,000. That compares to the total annual operating budget for the fixed-route system of $1,430,000.

The fixed-route has an annual ridership of 1.4 million at a fullyallocated cost-per-trip of $1.09. The reason I am here today is that I am concerned about the mobility of all citizens of the St. Cloud area. I, as a public transit professional, having worked with the disabled communities and the non-disabled communities, citizenry, in our area, to design their transportation programs that are requested, that they request, that they need, I am here to inform you of some facts that I believe are being overlooked or overshadowed by discussions to date on mainline transit accessibility.

In particular, some factors regarding small urban cities such as the size that St. Cloud has, and I will have to refute or, at least, disagree with some earlier comments in regards to some of the climatal conditions of the North and how we see that in St. Cloud. St. Cloud MTC and-and I put an emphasis on "and"-its disabled citizenry has continually, in the last fifteen years, put its money and its efforts into the specialized service system because in Minnesota we all feel that a fixed-route accessible transit system would, realistically, be unaccessible five months of the year.

St. Cloud does have some very real conditions that laws are not able to change. For example, the very health-endangering frigid temperatures that Minnesota does experience; neighbors who don't shovel their sidewalks one or two or three or even more days after heavy snowfalls or even light snowfalls and make mobility very dif ficult to impossible; snow-plow hills and ridges that border every street and every intersection among our three cities.

If a disabled citizen depends on public transit for their job, for school, for college, for physical therapy or for whatever on a daily basis, they need reliable and safe mobility, the type of mobility our specialized service provides and a fixed-route accessible system in St. Cloud, we feel, cannot provide: reliability.

St. Cloud's disabled citizenry realizes this statement and, since 1980, with the meetings and public hearings on 504, has argued that with the limited governmental subsidies and local efforts. monies and efforts should be expended on the mobility service needed and requested by St. Cloud's great majority of disabled citi

zens.

Accessible fixed-route transit will cost additional local funds for lift purchase, lift maintenance, driver training and whatever. There is a very legitimate fear that, with this additional fixedroute expenditure, decisions in the future to either decrease or to not increase the specialized service may be made.

I do realize that in the ADA bill, fixed-route accessibility also re quires a level of paratransit or a level of specialized service; but, at what level? Again, we are providing 13 percent right now, with a federal minimum of 3 percent. If the Commission, in future years. decided with an accessible fleet, and the budgets are tight, that maybe we can drop the specialized budget 3 percent, to go to 10 percent; that $45,000 to $50,000 means a lot of mobility. It would definitely decrease the mobility for disabled citizens with that kind of a decision.

You will see in front of you pictures I distributed of Mrs. Elodie Brengman of St. Cloud, shown here being picked up at her Northside home for a trip to the St. Cloud clinic. Mrs. Brengman is 80 years old and lives independently in her Northside home.

Once the user of our fixed-route, prior to her disabling accident in 1983, Mrs. Brengman uses our specialized service to go to the doctor, buy groceries and other staples, see her husband in a nursing home: basically remaining independently in her home. She is familiar with our fixed-route system because she once used it. She flatly states that if there was not a specialized service system-a door-to-door service from her alley to the door of the clinic, and that the only option was to go out to a route and use an accessible fixed-route bus, that she would hardly get out.

We all know, socially, what happens to the elderly when they start to stay at home too much and not get out and be active. As stated earlier, the great majority of our passengers, utilizing our service, are over the age of 65 and many share the same concerns and needs as Mrs. Brengman. As a transportation professional, I just hope that with all this discussion on accessibility and mobility that the Mrs. Brengman's of this country are not forgotten about and allowed to slip through the cracks. I do question if their mobility needs are really being adequately represented.

I then, also, must express some very genuine concerns about the negative impacts we see with mandated accessibility on the small fixed-route system like St. Cloud. Again, St. Cloud has a total of twelve routes, but only nine come into the downtown.

Most transit systems the metropolitan city size of St. Cloud have what is called a pulse or a time-transfer system. It is like a wagon wheel with the routes being the spokes and the transfer terminal being the hub. St. Cloud has that. We have thirty-minute and onehour routes. They come downtown every thirty minutes at 15 and 45 minutes after the hour. We have three minutes for transferring. Believe me, there are many times when those transfer conditions can be very, very tight. When transfers are missed, the system breaks down. It totally breaks down, at least for that passenger that is missing their transfer. From experiences from other liftequipped cities, we feel that the boarding, the tie-down and the deboarding time required for our accessible route, that there would have to be some hard decisions and some changes made to our route system.

We have three options; one, we take our 30-minute route system and we extend it to 35 or 40 minutes. In other words, we add slop time, to accommodate the wheel chair trip. This lengthens the transit travel time for all passengers, makes transit less convenient and, we believe, results in a passenger loss or the ability to not attract as many choice riders in the future.

The current 30-minute system is also very, very easy to understand. We can tell people on the phone for information that, "Your bus will be there at 7 after, or 37 after, every hour on the hour." When you go to 35 or 40, all of a sudden, now, it is 7 after and 42 after and 17 after, etc.

That doesn't seem to be a big deal for my staff. It doesn't seem to be a big deal for me because I can understand schedules and maps quite well. It is amazing, when you are standing along a dispatch

perhaps, heard of elsewhere. The total annual operating budget is $210,000. That compares to the total annual operating budget for the fixed-route system of $1,430,000.

The fixed-route has an annual ridership of 1.4 million at a fullyallocated cost-per-trip of $1.09. The reason I am here today is that I am concerned about the mobility of all citizens of the St. Cloud area. I, as a public transit professional, having worked with the disabled communities and the non-disabled communities, citizenry, in our area, to design their transportation programs that are requested, that they request, that they need, I am here to inform you of some facts that I believe are being overlooked or overshadowed by discussions to date on mainline transit accessibility.

In particular, some factors regarding small urban cities such as the size that St. Cloud has, and I will have to refute or, at least, disagree with some earlier comments in regards to some of the climatal conditions of the North and how we see that in St. Cloud. St. Cloud MTC and-and I put an emphasis on "and"-its disabled citizenry has continually, in the last fifteen years, put its money and its efforts into the specialized service system because in Minnesota we all feel that a fixed-route accessible transit system would, realistically, be unaccessible five months of the year.

St. Cloud does have some very real conditions that laws are not able to change. For example, the very health-endangering frigid temperatures that Minnesota does experience; neighbors who don't shovel their sidewalks one or two or three or even more days after heavy snowfalls or even light snowfalls and make mobility very difficult to impossible; snow-plow hills and ridges that border every street and every intersection among our three cities.

If a disabled citizen depends on public transit for their job, for school, for college, for physical therapy or for whatever on a daily basis, they need reliable and safe mobility, the type of mobility our specialized service provides and a fixed-route accessible system in St. Cloud, we feel, cannot provide: reliability.

St. Cloud's disabled citizenry realizes this statement and, since 1980, with the meetings and public hearings on 504, has argued that with the limited governmental subsidies and local efforts. monies and efforts should be expended on the mobility service needed and requested by St. Cloud's great majority of disabled citi

zens.

Accessible fixed-route transit will cost additional local funds for lift purchase, lift maintenance, driver training and whatever. There is a very legitimate fear that, with this additional fixedroute expenditure, decisions in the future to either decrease or to not increase the specialized service may be made.

I do realize that in the ADA bill, fixed-route accessibility also re quires a level of paratransit or a level of specialized service; but, at what level? Again, we are providing 13 percent right now, with a federal minimum of 3 percent. If the Commission, in future years. decided with an accessible fleet, and the budgets are tight, that maybe we can drop the specialized budget 3 percent, to go to 10 percent; that $45,000 to $50,000 means a lot of mobility. It would definitely decrease the mobility for disabled citizens with that kind of a decision.

You will see in front of you pictures I distributed of Mrs. Elodie Brengman of St. Cloud, shown here being picked up at her Northside home for a trip to the St. Cloud clinic. Mrs. Brengman is 80 years old and lives independently in her Northside home.

Once the user of our fixed-route, prior to her disabling accident in 1983, Mrs. Brengman uses our specialized service to go to the doctor, buy groceries and other staples, see her husband in a nursing home: basically remaining independently in her home. She is familiar with our fixed-route system because she once used it. She flatly states that if there was not a specialized service system-a door-to-door service from her alley to the door of the clinic, and that the only option was to go out to a route and use an accessible fixed-route bus, that she would hardly get out.

We all know, socially, what happens to the elderly when they start to stay at home too much and not get out and be active. As stated earlier, the great majority of our passengers, utilizing our service, are over the age of 65 and many share the same concerns and needs as Mrs. Brengman. As a transportation professional, I just hope that with all this discussion on accessibility and mobility that the Mrs. Brengman's of this country are not forgotten about and allowed to slip through the cracks. I do question if their mobility needs are really being adequately represented.

I then, also, must express some very genuine concerns about the negative impacts we see with mandated accessibility on the small fixed-route system like St. Cloud. Again, St. Cloud has a total of twelve routes, but only nine come into the downtown.

Most transit systems the metropolitan city size of St. Cloud have what is called a pulse or a time-transfer system. It is like a wagon wheel with the routes being the spokes and the transfer terminal being the hub. St. Cloud has that. We have thirty-minute and onehour routes. They come downtown every thirty minutes at 15 and 45 minutes after the hour. We have three minutes for transferring. Believe me, there are many times when those transfer conditions can be very, very tight. When transfers are missed, the system breaks down. It totally breaks down, at least for that passenger that is missing their transfer. From experiences from other liftequipped cities, we feel that the boarding, the tie-down and the deboarding time required for our accessible route, that there would have to be some hard decisions and some changes made to our route system.

We have three options; one, we take our 30-minute route system and we extend it to 35 or 40 minutes. In other words, we add slop time, to accommodate the wheel chair trip. This lengthens the transit travel time for all passengers, makes transit less convenient and, we believe, results in a passenger loss or the ability to not attract as many choice riders in the future.

The current 30-minute system is also very, very easy to understand. We can tell people on the phone for information that, "Your bus will be there at 7 after, or 37 after, every hour on the hour." When you go to 35 or 40, all of a sudden, now, it is 7 after and 42 after and 17 after, etc.

That doesn't seem to be a big deal for my staff. It doesn't seem to be a big deal for me because I can understand schedules and maps quite well. It is amazing, when you are standing along a dispatch

counter and you hear your dispatcher talk to the general public, answering their information calls, that the simpler you make your system, the more successful you will be, and people's mobility will be. People have a hard time understanding schedule times.

The second option is to cut off the far ends of that 30-minute route so as to still have a 30-minute route. That is kind of silly because then you reduce availability of public transit to all citizens. Your third option is just to leave your 30 minute route structure the same, don't do a thing with it. But then, in the case of a missed transfer because of the boarding and tie-down and deboarding time, you are going to have a bus with some bitter people. Minneapolis just finished a two-year demonstration project and has released their study. And they show about rider reactions. They will state that, generally, fixed-route passenger-able-bodied fixed-route passenger reactions-have been pleasant. But when they start missing their transfers, then the opinions start to become very, very negative.

In either one of those cases, as far as our fixed-route situation, I feel we are in a lose/lose situation. We are spending $210,000 on a service which meets the mobility needs. If we were in the South, or in a better climatal condition, we could, literally, have a $60,000 door-to-door service and take $150,000 and put it into the fixedroute system to accommodate 15-minute service instead of 30minute service. Would that bring more mobility? I think it would to able-bodied passengers because, now, you have made your fixedroute even more convenient with more frequent service. But it would not bring more mobility to the disabled in St. Cloud. That is a strong statement, and I will stand behind that.

Our commission requests that this committee realize that what St. Cloud is currently practicing and committed to is superior to what most of the transit systems are practicing and that our disabled citizenry be allowed to decide what type of transit service best meets their mobility needs. We respectfully request some sort of amendment with regards to a waiver or local option be seriously requested and written into this historic legislation.

Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, thank you for your consideration. I am more than happy to answer questions. However, I would like to hold off questions until after Ms. Wingen has her testimony.

Mr. MINETA. Than you very much. Ms. Wingen?

Ms. WINGEN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and other members of the Subcommittee on Surface Transportation. I am here today as both a person with a disability and an advocate for persons with disabilities in the St. Cloud, Central Minnesota, area. I am currently the founder and executive director of a non-profit organization by the name of Advocacy Plus Action, INC. I am here in support, basically, of what Mr. Tripp has already outlined. The ability to get from one place to another, as well as to get there inexpensively and quickly, has become a necessity for any American who wants the opportunity to be employed, to participate in recreational activities, to enjoy a full and stimulating life. However, the reality is that a significant minority of the nation's population does not have the mobility that most people take for granted. To be a person with a disability and disadvantaged can mean exclusion