by Allan Appel and Thomas Breen
All customers — not just those in wheelchairs — now have to wait outside to be helped at the new bus ticket sales outlet on Church Street, as the state works to make the one-step-elevated storefront “accessible for all.”
State Department of Transportation (DOT) spokesperson Eva Zymaris provided the Independent with that update Tuesday in response to a question about why the front door at 72 Church St. is now locked.
The state first opened that storefront on Jan. 5 at a location that requires customers and CTtransit employees to walk up one step. (The storefront replaces the previous bus ticket sales kiosk on Chapel Street, which the state closed on Jan. 3.)
Initially, the state was going to allow customers who could navigate a step to go inside the 72 Church St. storefront as they sought help buying a bus pass. Customers who could not climb a step had to press a button for an employee to go outside and help them buy a ticket.
A sign now hangs on the storefront’s front door that reads: “Welcome!!! The vestibule is temporarily closed. Please ring the bell for service. Thank you.”
Zymaris told the Independent that, indeed, all customers now need to wait outside when looking for help buying a bus pass at this location. “The vestibule will be closed to ensure equal access to customers while we continue working on solutions to make the space accessible for all,” Zymaris wrote.
Zymaris confirmed this new wait-outside-for-all policy a day after the city’s Commission on Disabilities held its latest monthly meeting online on Monday.
At the meeting, commissioners offered an impassioned critique during an hourlong brainstorming session about the new 72 Church St. sales outlet.
Some of the questions and concerns raised by those in attendance at Monday’s meeting included:
Even if you manage to have a bus pass or ticket in hand from the new 72 Church St. transit sales outlet, how do you navigate the narrow, uneven, rutted sidewalk back to the hub on the Green?
And how, with poor signage and few if any audio aids for the visually and hearing impaired back at the confusing central hub, do you figure out where or when your bus is pulling in and opening its doors?
Why, even with a ticket in hand, you well might miss your bus!
In short, the problem is a lot broader and deeper than a new DOT ticket sales office at 72 Church St. that was opened without a ramp for the disabled.
In addition to the commissioners, led by their chair Tricia Palluzzi and the head of the city’s Disability Services office Gretchen Knauff, the regular monthly meeting drew a half dozen members of the public via Zoom.
Click here for an article about the recent ribbon cutting event to mark the opening of the 72 Church St. office that’s meant to replace the sales and info kiosk on the Green.
While DOT Commissioner Garrett Eucalitto praised the move during the Jan. 5 presser largely for offering the dozen DOT employees a bathroom and more indoor and secure working area, disability rights advocates like David Agosta called the ramp-less office and location a thoughtless act of discrimination that is “violating federal law.”
“I’ve never encountered a city like New Haven,” Commissioner Allie Futty said at Monday’s meeting, “where the main bus nexus is an insane free-for-all. Where there’s not enough time, where you’re running, a bus just pulls in and it’s gone!
“Every other city I’ve lived in, smaller to midsize, all have had a bus terminal, where a bus, whatever the route, pulls into the same slot. When you have three or four pulling up in the same place at the same time, it’s crazy. The kiosk [closure] speaks to a larger lack of thinking about accessibility in one of the state’s larger transit hubs.”
Commission Chair Palluzzi expressed astonishment how the new sales outlet could have been approved, with its 8.5-inch step up and no ramp and a questionable turning radius in the vestibule, should a wheelchair-bound person even be able to get in.
“This seems like a ridiculous way to run a company,” she concluded.
“They’ve gotten so many complaints about inaccessibility,” reported Knauff of the visit she made to the office, “they appear to be asking everyone to stay out and serve them [outside], when they ring the bell provided.”
However, the bell, which is supposed to be rung if you want assistance getting in, seemed to be broken, she reported of the visit.
As to the ramp fix, should that be in the works, “There’s really no room to create it due to a tree nearby and the sidewalk width, and also the sidewalks have cracks and issues and the curb ramps are filled in with tar material making them uneven.
“The upshot is they seem to be treating everyone equally,” she said, with sad irony.
“As it stands,” said downtown disability rights advocate David Agosta, who had attended the opening and spearheaded the complaints, “if someone bought a ticket there, they would be denied access to the bus they bought a ticket for.”
A bevy of local alders and state officials including State Rep. Al Paolillo and Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney are aware of the complaints, commissioners reported.
When Palluzzi, as part of the brainstorming, suggested an outside ticket window at the 72 Church St. location done at accessible height as some kind of at least temporary solution, Nkenge Hook, who has been tapped to serve on the commission, expressed skepticism.
“That spot is very narrow and crowded with people. A ticket window is a good idea but there would be a lot of congestion.”
“There have been suggestions that there are spaces directly across from the existing kiosk that might work,” said Agosta. “But I don’t know.”
Eucalitto had said, at the opening, in response to Agosta, that “DOT is open to continuing to make changes to 72 Church Street that could make it accessible.”
Yet the commissioners seemed intent on broadening the discussion far beyond the ramp-less storefront, whose opening “blindsided,” to use Agosta’s term, the disability community.
And in situating the discussion of a disability perspective in relation to transit in the broader discussion of major changes for the Green that are on the city’s agenda this year.
“This is a time to do it,” said Palluzzi, “if they’re revamping the Green. You have that whole block to organize where buses go.”
Sally Esposito, a former head of the city’s disability service office, suggested the commissioners put together specific requests and also bring in transit representatives regularly to the commission meetings to make them aware of the issues, as plans unfold.
In a flight of imagination, taking off from Allie Futty’s vision, Knauff said, Yes, why not consider, on the unpaved path at the southern end of the Green behind the kiosk, “on the dirt part, you could put in [real, organized bus] stalls one, two, three . . .”
“There really needs to be a bus station,” said Ally. “If we are allowed to make a suggestion, let it be a Dream Suggestion, that we have one [station] in New Haven that buses pull up in a logical space. We can figure it out.”
The bus ticket sales outlet at 72 Church. The now-closed kiosk on Chapel St.
