We are a public agency, and we provide public transportation services to residents of Virginia's Regional Planning District X, which includes Mr. Payne's home county of Nelson County, four other rural counties, and the small urbanized area of Charlottesville, Virginia.

We have a population of about 161,000 in that community and those rural counties. We operate a fleet of 32 vehicles and probably will be expanding that to about 34, all under 20 passenger. We offer demand response service, fixed route, commuter route service, and we run the regional ride sharing system in our area.

We do operate in a community where there is a fixed route system. In the city where the fixed route system exists, we provide the accessible transportation service. Our ridership this past year, that was for the 1987-1988 year, we provided 160,000 passenger trips, of which approximately half were for disabled persons, and about 23 percent of our total trips, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 37,000, were for persons in wheelchairs. So, we are experienced in transporting the disabled.

As for my own experience, in addition to operating this transportation system, I serve as a member of the executive committee of our local independent living center, I am on the Transportation Committee for the Virginia Board for the Rights of the Disabled, and I have served for the past three years, since 1986, and was one of the founders of the National Association for Transportation Alternatives, NASTA, which merged this summer with Rural America to form the Community Transportation Association of America. We at CTAA are the advocacy and membership organization for what we always call the "significant others," but we basically serve the rural, small urban, human services and specialized transportation systems as a membership organization.

We have public entities as members, we have private non-profit members, and we have some private for profit members. We have about a 300-member membership, but we serve actually an industry of somewhere around four to five thousand providers.

About 1200 of those are small rural systems with Section 18 funds. And we have a number, I would say somewhere between four and five thousand out there of other kinds of systems, human services, HHS systems.

I am presently continuing as a member of the Board of CTAA, and I am here in my capacity as a member of the Board to present the CTAA Board's views.

We represent those folks who know what specialized and accessible transportation is all about. We know how difficult it is to provide, and we know how important it is. So I want to give you my views-remember that I am speaking for myself but mainly for my industry.

CTAA's statement of objectives pledges the organization to work to establish public policies that recognize individual mobility as a basic human right. That came out of our statement of purpose. So it follows logically that we subscribe to the central principle of the Americans With Disabilities Act, that this commitment to mobility cannot be discriminatory in character.

At a meeting of our Board last week, we agreed it was important that we establish a statement and a formal policy on accessibility, I

am not going to read that. It's rather wordy, and we have a lot to accomplish. But it is attached to my written testimony, and I would ask that you take note of it because we worked hard to come up with a statement that we thought was fair and important.

The issue of accessible transportation has a special familiarity for our members. Most of us in this industry started out doing human services transportation. My own transit system began in 1975 as a consortium of several community agencies; probably at that time, only five or six.

We now serve 77 human service agencies in the 5-county area. We are the human service transportation provider. About half of our passengers are funded or paid for by human service agencies, and the other half pay out of their own pockets as public riders.

So, we know what we are talking about when we refer to the transit dependent. That includes persons with disabilities, and they continue to constitute the core of our ridership.

In many urban areas, it's interesting to note that CTAA members, and my own agency is one, are relied on at the present time to provide all the accessible transportation for the public transportation system.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, which is our central city, we have a very small fixed route bus system, and right now, the system is not life equipped or basically handicap accessible. It has kneeling buses that make it easy for elderly people to get on, but wheelchairs cannot be accommodated. So we provide the accessible system, all the accessible transportation in the urban area.

In many rural areas around the country, our members are human service transportation providers who receive no UMTA funding or no direct federal transit assistance. Many of these are human service agencies who get HHS funds, but there still may be in those rural communities-it was interesting this morning to hear Mr. Craig, for example, talking about his rural area because in many rural areas, only the human service agencies provide any transportation for the folks who live there.

We are particularly aware that the barriers to accessibility take many forms, and that removing those barriers requires a variety of responses. It's not going to take one response or another response to remove those barriers. That includes both accessible fixed route service and complimentary paratransit service.

The CTAA organization believes that this legislation should be put into the perspective of our members and the people we serve. I want to point out several concerns that we have. First of all, the national commitment to full accessibility for transit reflected by this bill-and I am going to say something that is unpopular with a lot of people-has to be accompanied by a national commitment to achieve it without making transit and those who depend on it bear the full cost.

There is no way that you can pass a bill like this and not have some accompanying appropriations bill. It is absolutely impossible. If enactment of ADA is not accompanied by appropriate financial support, it becomes a zero-sum game in which service will actually be diminished rather than made more equitable and adequate.

Just to point out a couple of things, currently the non-urban areas in the country receive about 3 percent of all the UMTA

funds. This past fiscal year, non-urban areas received $64 million. The appropriations that have already been approved by the House for non-urban areas in 1990 is $52 million, so that is a $12 million dollar cut.

At the same time, it is being considered that we will have to increase the amount of transportation we are providing to the disabled. There is a definite contradiction here, because we already receive so little money that most of us aren't even able to buy new buses. This is significant because most of our vehicles are small vehicles. They are body on chassis vehicles or mini vans that have ramps. None of us have anything really fancy, no big buses. The most expensive vehicle in my fleet costs under $40,000.

You would think replacing a vehicle wouldn't be such an expensive proposition. We consider our vehicles worn out or depreciated at 90,000 miles, and about three years. But I just recently auctioned off some 1981 vehicles that were creeping up on 200,000 miles.

We have been, as we have been replacing vehicles, getting more and more wheelchair accessible vehicles. But it's an expensive proposition, because the money is not there to pay for them.

So what we are concerned about here is the fact that while we are talking about the program, in no way can you avoid discussing the costs.

One thing no one has mentioned today is insurance. If you are going to be handling persons who are disabled, you are going to expect your insurance to go up, believe me, take it from one who has to pay that insurance, and there are many hidden costs.

There just has to be accompanying money or this bill will never happen, no matter how much you want it to happen. It will never be a reality because the money won't be there.

Secondly, the equality of access to transit sought by this legislation is only a part of the equality of access to transit that our organization is working for. We want to stress that in many rural areas and in a surprising number of small urban areas, ADA is mandating equal access to non-existant or totally inadequate transit resources and services.

What we are saying here basically is that what ADA is mandating is that where transit exists, there be equal access, but no one is mentioning anywhere in this act that those areas that do not have any transit provide something for the disabled who do not have any way to get around.

We have heard people talking about the fact that when you are blind, you cannot drive. It's expensive to purchase a vehicle if you are disabled. People have different sorts of disabilities. There are some people who cannot even drive an equipped vehicle because of their type of disability.

What this basically means is that you have to live in the city. You cannot be disabled and live in a rural area. For instance, in Virginia, 77 percent of the state doesn't have any kind of public transportation. We have statistics showing that our recent analysis determined that one-fourth of all the urbanized areas of less than 100,000 population are unserved by federally assisted transit. 97 percent of the larger urbanized areas have public transit. The disparity is even greater in rural areas which represent 40 percent of

the total population, an estimated one-third of those who could be classified as transit dependent, Rural areas only have 4 percent of federal transportation assistance, and a similar share of current transit services. So we are really looking here at a transit gap.

We do have, I think, a serious issue, and I will give you an example. I am trying to watch the time and have respect for my cohorts here, but I do want to give you one example.

Recently I dealt with an issue in a rural county in our service area that we currently don't serve. We don't provide any public transportation in that county because the local government wouldn't put up their share of the money, and you cannot get federal and state money without local money. I had a woman from that county come to me, she was really desperate. Her husband was diabetic and was on renal dialysis at the University Hospital, which is in Charlottesville, and she lived about 60 miles away. She wanted me to provide transportation for her husband. She had been able to get him in for his dialysis three days a week. He had one leg amputated, but even with one leg amputated, he could still get in and out of the car. Then he had his second leg amputated. Suddenly the situation changed. Here's a very large man, a very small wife. They live far out in the country, no neighbors nearby, and she cannot get him in and out of the car, much less in and out of his wheelchair. So her doctors told her to call us. We couldn't help her. We cannot provide transportation in their county. They are not eligible for medicaid because they own property.

The result was that these folks had to give up their family home and move into the City of Charlottesville because it was the only way he could get access to medical treatment. So people in rural areas are really hurt by a lack of transportation, and the disabled in rural areas soon become the disabled in urban areas. That's where they go.

While this issue is probably most glaring for local transit services, it is also reflected in intercity service. Goodness knows we have heard enough about that today. Even before bus deregulation rural areas were losing intercity bus service. Since the 1982 legislation that loss has accelerated.

We feel this trend must be ended and reversed. We are working with Greyhound. As a matter of fact it was NASTA-that preceded CTAA-that worked with Mr. Currey to start the Rural Connector Program. My own system is a member of the Rural Connector system. We take people to the Greyhound bus. We have an arrangement with them. I told Mr. Currey this morning that it is an interesting fact that many of the people we transport to the Greyhound bus are disabled people, but they are not people in wheelchairs.

There are many disabled people using Greyhound but there is that one group of people, the people in wheelchairs, who cannot get up into the bus, who do not have this access.

We think that what Mr. Currey is proposing is an important initiative and that Greyhound deserves great credit for taking it. We are concerned that there is currently no accessible transportation outside the city limits.

Another brief story and I will close shortly: A year and a half ago, in January of 1988, we had our inaugural ceremony in Char

lottesville for the Rural Connector program. We had a number of dignitaries there: people from UMTA, the state secretary of transportation, a vice-president from Greyhound. It was a very special ceremony to show the happy marriage between rural public transportation and the intercity bus service. The person who was master of ceremonies for that program was our board vice-president, a man, 28 years old, who is in a wheelchair because of a disease that caused him to have fragile, easily broken bones. It was almost impossible for him to get out of his wheelchair without injury.

He could not move around without injury outside of his wheelchair. He had a specially made motorized chair. The culmination of that ceremony was a ride on a brand new beautiful Greyhound bus. Everyone got to ride but the master of ceremonies. We had to bring a special van from our transit system that rode around behind the bus so that he could be part of the ceremony.

I think that this story is what we are all here about, folks. We would like to be able to see disabled people not always trailing around behind those who are able-bodied, but having their own entree to full accessibility. The problem is how do we do it and how do we afford it?

To summarize, we at CTAA believe enactment of the ADA is an important step toward our own goal of full accessibility and mobility regardless of where you live. Someone mentioned earlier the fact that, as you age you become more disabled. Remember that this is not someone else's problem, because all of us, if we live long enough, are going to begin to see our bodies go. I look at my own mother who is now 77 years old and still driving. A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference with a woman who told me about her mother in her 80's, who lived in a section of rural Iowa where there was no public transportation. I asked her if her mother was still driving and she said yes, illegally. She lost her license but she is out there, can't see, physically unable to get around, but, because she is determined to be independent and to live at home and to have that quality of life that we all want, she is still driving her car in spite of everything. She may end her years in jail, but by golly she will have her independence! We are all concerned about access to mobility, and the resulting quality of life. Thank you for letting me testify.

Mr. MINETA. Thank you very, very much.

Mr. Ray Mundy, Executive Director, Airport Ground Transportation Association.

Mr. MUNDY. Mr. Chairman and Members, I am gaining new respect for the durability of my elected representatives. I come today to make these remarks both as Executive Director of the Airport Ground Transportation Association and a professor of transportation at the University of Tennessee.

I am quite familiar with the users and the providers of transportation. In our association our operator members are people who run vans, people who run sedans, taxi cabs, mini-buses and overthe-road coaches. They run them on fixed routes, fixed schedules, in demand-responsive modes and mixed modes in many cases.

The predominant mode at the airport is demand-responsive from the airport and predominately fixed-route schedule from hotels to the airport. Does that make these services demand-responsive,