Minutes to the Seventh Meeting of the
Accessible Transportation Standards Development Committee (T-SDC)

Canadian Standards Association
5060 Spectrum Way
Mississauga, ON
August 28 - 29, 2006

Members Present :

• Al Cormier, Cor Al Services, Chair
• George Ansell, Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
• Jo-Ann Bentley, Canadian Hearing Society
• James Bisson, Association of Municipal Managers, Clerks and Treasurers of Ontario/City of Mississauga (August 28 only)
• Earl Black, Independent Living Resource Centre
• Mark Brose, Transportation Action Now
• Silvan Bruno, GO Transit
• Tony Carnovale, Community Living Ontario
• Katrina Carrera, Association des municipalités Francophones de l'Ontario
• David Carroll, Ontario Motor Coach Association and School Bus Association
• Vanissa Szeto, Ministry of Education
• Sharon Hambleton, Ontario Federation of Labour (represented by Duncan MacDonald)
• Blyth Helman, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board
• Glenn Johnston, Toronto Transit Commission
• Kim Lambert, Ministry of Transportation (represented by Rob Barnes)
• Caroline Lonsdale, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care
• Lesley Anne MacDonald, Canadian National Institute for the Blind
• Alex Milojevic, Association of Municipalties of Ontario, City of Brampton (August 28 only)
• Tim Nolan, Council of Ontario Universities
• Kelly Palecnzy, Ontario Community Transportation Association
• Lloyd Pollock, Dignity Transportation Incorporated
• Danielle Svec, Life Skills Institute (Bloorview Kids Rehab) (August 29 only)
• Valmay Barkey, Ontario Community Support Association
• Tanya Wanio, Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing

Absent Members:

• Spiros Bastas, Royal Taxi
• Alex Grant, HAGI Community Services for Independence
• Susan Enid Mintz, The Kidney Foundation of Canada

Support Unit:

• Kevin Boehmer, Canadian Standards Association
• Mike Dodd, Canadian Standards Association, Transportation SDC Secretary
• Mansur Rahim, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario
• Jill Sawchuk, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario
• Bob Sherman, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario
• Michael Sullivan, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario
• Nelly Tion, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario
• Scot Weeres, Accessibility Directorate of Ontario

Consultants:

• Dennis Fletcher, ENTRA Consultants
• Angela Iannuzziello, ENTRA Consultants
• Remo Bucci, Deloitte
• Michael Cautillo, Deloitte
• Brian Szeto, Deloitte
• David Dilks, Lura Consulting
• Susan Hall, Lura Consulting

M7.1 Call to Order
M. Dodd, project manager at Canadian Standards Association, called the meeting to order at 9:30 a.m. on August 28.

M7.2 Housekeeping and Facility Safety
M. Dodd advised members of the housekeeping issues and facility safety procedures for the meeting.

M7.3 Opening Remarks and Membership Introductions
A. Cormier welcomed participants to the 7th meeting and detailed key meeting objectives:

• Provide feedback to costing consultants during a Day 1 workshop;
• Address member concerns with a "process check-up" on Day 2; and
• Define a workplan forward on Day 2.

A. Cormier noted that Lura Consulting had been retained to facilitate costing workshop, process check-up and workplan agenda items.

M7.4 Approval of the Agenda
The draft agenda was approved with the addition of a "process check-up" on Day 2.

M7.5 Membership
M. Dodd noted that P. Chin was replacing C. Lonsdale as the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care representative. M. Dodd also reported that D. MacDonald was an alternate for S. Hambleton of the Ontario Federation of Labour.

M7.6 Readiness and Costing Workshop
D. Dilks facilitated a readiness and costing workshop on August 28 where committee members dialogued with consultants from Deloitte and Entra. The following questions were distributed to members and used as the basis of discussion:

1. Do you have any questions on what was done? Is there anything missing?
2. What are your perspectives on the findings?
3. What implications do you see for the proposed standard?
4. Where will these costs likely fall (i.e. who pays: user, municipality, province etc)?
5. How would you characterize the impacts of these costs on the transportation system (i.e. negligible, significant) and what are the impacts from an affordability perspective (i.e. do-able, significant trade-offs required, etc.)?
6. Where do we go from here?

Members provided the following direction to readiness and costing consultants for consideration in subsequent work:

Transit

• Remove retrofit scenarios.
• Show impact with, and without, audible stop announcements.
• Assess impacts associated with fixed transit becoming increasingly accessible.

Specialized

• Assume baseline scenario is 2006.
• Provide list of costing assumptions for committee review and comment prior to final costing.

Commuter Rail and Bus

• Include Ontario Northland Transportation and Communication services and costs under the intercity category.

Taxi

• Use equal split between rear and side door vehicle configurations.
• Confirm unit costs with manufacturers.
• Use weighted average approach for training costs.
• Confirm no double counting exists between taxi and booked service fare parity costs.
• Maintain 16% of fleet size accessible assumption.
• Obtain cost per trip information from members.

Streetcars

• Provide comparative metrics such as estimated cost versus total budgets or cost per trip.
• Cost the provision of audible stop announcement on existing stock.
• M. Brose suggested that the committee consider requiring 50% of streetcars to be accessible by 2015. The Chair asked that discussion on this issue be deferred until such time that the committee was considering specific technical requirements for streetcars.

Inter-city Coach

• Identify the percentage of carriers under provincial jurisdiction and use for costing.

M7.7 Process Check-up
S. Hall facilitated a process check-up on the morning of August 29. The process check-up was designed to gather information on strengths and weaknesses of the standards development process to-date. The following questions were distributed to members and used as the basis of discussion:

1. What would you say are the Committee’s most notable accomplishments?
2. What has worked well?
3. What has not worked well?
4. What process improvements would help us complete our mandate (time, information, etc)?
5. Timelines – Thinking about each of the process improvements we’ve identified: How much more time may be needed? How many more meetings are needed? Is additional time needed between meetings for better preparation, consultation, etc.?
6. Next Steps – Where do we go from here?

While noting that the committee had worked professionally and collegially in achieving significant progress over a short period of time, member suggestions for improvement included:

Existing Process

• Develop principles to guide content development.
• Develop an objective, as opposed to prescriptive, based standard.
• Make available sector profiles that might detail best-practice, operational issues, barriers to persons with disabilities, existing legislation, regulations and standards.
• Consider inviting non-committee members (eg, manufacturers) to make presentations.
• Consider implications of proposed standards requirements for medium or small municipalities.
• Define and update a technical work plan.
• Attempt to not reopen agreed to items.
• Improve clarity, accuracy, timeliness and completeness of committee communications and documentation.
• Ensure proposed changes to the draft standard have been agreed to before including in subsequent drafts.
• Add analytical/context information to committee materials where possible.
• Schedule meeting intervals to allow for sufficient time to complete and distribute work at least two weeks in advance of the subsequent meeting.

Future Processes

• Should complete cross-sectoral standards before new sectoral standards.
• Should provide detailed sector profiles (eg, best practices, inter-jurisdictional scan, readiness and costing, legislation, regulations and standards) to committee members at the start of the process.
• Committee members should be involved in the design of seed documents or initial drafts of the proposed standard.
• Need to detail the proposed standard scope at the beginning of the process.
• Committee members should be more involved in the design of readiness and costing assessments.
• Ensure balance is maintained through committee selection and maintenance processes.
• Include less process and more sector profiling activities to the member orientation and training session.

M7.8 Minutes to the Last Meeting

The draft minutes to Meeting 6 (July 24 and 25, 2006) distributed to members by e-mail on August 10, 2006 were approved as circulated.

M7.9 Action Items from the Last Meeting

The following Meeting 6 action items were reported upon:

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