Public Comment - Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility Guidelines for Transportation Vehicles

National Center for Environmental Health Strategies, Inc.

1100 Rural Avenue

Voorhees, New Jersey 08043

(856)429-5358; (856)816-8820

marylamielle@ncehs.org

November 8, 2010
RE: Public Comment Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility Guidelines for Transportation Vehicles
Docket Number 2007-1; RIN Number 3014-AA38C
E-mail Subject Line: Docket Number: ATBCB 2010-0004; RIN 3014-AA38
Good Morning:
Thank you for the opportunity to provide public comment on the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) Accessibility Guidelines for Transportation Vehicles.
My name is Mary Lamielle. I’m executive director of the National Center for Environmental Health Strategies (NCEHS). NCEHS is dedicated to protecting the public health and improving the lives of people sick or disabled by chemical and environmental exposures.
People with environmental disabilities including people with chemical and electrical sensitivities are underserved, underrepresented populations who suffer greatly due to the failure of the federal government to address these disabilities in a collaborative and comprehensive fashion.
Up to 6% of Americans are chronically ill and disabled by chemical sensitivities. An estimated 3% of Californians report electrical sensitivities. Many people with environmental disabilities have multiple disabilities including mobility impairments.
The U. S. Access Board is proposing to revise and update its guidelines for buses, over-the-road buses, and vans. The guidelines are intended to ensure that transportation vehicles are readily accessible to and useable by individuals with disabilities. The guidelines will apply to the acquisition of new, used, and remanufactured transpiration vehicles, and the remanufacture of exiting transportation vehicles to the extent required by regulations issued by the Department of Transportation.
Several months ago I was a passenger in a car stopped at a traffic light next to a New Jersey Transit Bus. Inside the driver’s window I saw an aerosol air freshener, a disinfectant, and a can of Oust. The driver’s window was partially open. All other windows on the bus were inoperable.
People with chemical sensitivities/intolerances react to low level everyday exposures including air fresheners, deodorizers, disinfectants, cleaning agents, pesticides, and fragrances and fragranced products among other substances and products. These and similar indoor contaminants are access barriers for people with these disabilities.
All buses and vans should be designed and manufactured with operable windows. It is also important that the ventilation system be designed and maintained optimally functioning together with a filtering mechanism to minimize indoor pollutants and limit contaminants from fuel sources. Buses and vans should be designed and constructed to minimize the use of toxic materials.
Buses and vans also need to be cleaned and maintained with least toxic products and practices to minimize indoor contaminants. This should include restrictions on the use of pesticides in favor of Integrated Pest Management Practices and low impact pest control products if necessary. Protocol should restrict the use of air fresheners, deodorizers, and disinfectants, and recommend the use of least toxic/allergenic cleaning agents. The Operations and Maintenance section of the U.S. Access Board-funded “Indoor Environmental Quality Project Report” provides extensive guidance on such products and practices. (
In response to retired attorney and local disability rights advocate Kathleen Flaherty, Evanston, Illinois, Section 13-1 Health and Safety Benefits in “The Evanston Multi-Modal Transportation Plan,” April 2009 (
I recently had occasion to speak with an employee of DC Transit whose job it is to determine whether individuals qualify for transit services. She told me that she denies people who are disabled by chemical sensitivities access to barrier-free cabs in which the request is generally that the cab be free of fragrances and fragranced products including the use of unscented personal care products by the driver because these individuals are not specifically identified as a disabled population in the ADA. These same individuals would be unable to use public transit buses due to the same or similar access barriers.
It is important that the Access Board continue to investigate the ways in which they can act to enhance disability access for the millions of people disabled by chemical sensitivities who are routinely denied access to essential services and to ensure that government personnel, professionals, and the public are educated about the disability access needs of these individuals.
Thank you.


Attachment: ADA & IEQ: Clean Air Access To Public Transit, Kathleen Flaherty, J.D., October 15, 2008
















Attachment: www.access-board.gov/research/ieq) http://www.cityofevanston.org/pdf/EvanstonMulti-ModalTransportationPlan.pdf) specifically recommends actions to improve indoor air quality in vehicles, restrooms, and waiting areas. The plan notes that indoor air quality is a serious issue for “persons with asthma, pulmonary disease, and chemical sensitivities as well as other respiratory, immune, neurological, and cardiovascular disabilities.” ADA & IEQ: Clean Air Access To Public Transit
Indoor Environmental Quality (“IEQ”)—in vehicles, restrooms, &
waiting areas—is an ADA Compliance issue: “CLEAN AIR ACCESS.”
The “ordinary” toxic chemicals used in public transit vehicles,
restrooms, and buildings deny safe access to persons with asthma, COPD and chemical sensitivities, as well as other respiratory, immune, neurological, and cardiovascular disabilities.
Please see the 2005 joint report from the National Institutes of Building Sciences & the Access Board for a detailed guide to improving ADA access by improving IEQ:
For a quick start on improving IEQ:www.access-board.gov/research/ieq Switch to non-toxic cleaning & remodeling products.
Effective & affordable alternatives are readily available.
Stop routine pesticiding and switch to Integrated Pest
Management, using least-toxic alternatives.
Remove all fragrance-emitting devices from vehicles, restrooms, and buildings. This includes “air fresheners.” They
are unhealthy and unnecessary.
Create a liaison between ADA compliance staff and maintenance/repair staff—who are, one hopes, already working
on conversion to Greener products.
Include CLEAN AIR ACCESS in your ADA training for staff,
especially drivers and maintenance workers.10/15/08 Kathleen Flaherty, J.D. kflare@sbcglobal.net

John Edwards' Campaign Tapes Directed by Rielle Hunter, Now on YouTube

Tonight is the last Saturday night before Halloween when it will be party time for many organizations in the Washington area. How convenient for partiers. They don't even have to change the date (almost) so the various and sundry assorted bureaucrats in Washington, many of whom do not even work for the government but for nonprofit organizations made up of large corporations, because corporations are people, too, like the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, otherwise known as Big Pharma, can celebrate Halloween at a more convenient time.

Big Pharma is made up of people, too, who like to do as little as possible, like most Washingtonians because doing as little as possible and bragging about all you've done for other people when all you've done is taken their money is by and large the major occupation of Washington. All people in Washington do is know other people. They know the wrong people who of course, live and work beyond the Beltway and take their money for knowing the right people, who work in the government.

If there is anything my years around here have taught me, it's that people in government are the last people I want to be working with or talking to these days. Of course, it was different in the old days. People in government in World War II, my mother told me, were quite different. She was one of them, of course, and if anyone says anything remotely resembling criticism of this fine person I will personally do worse than kick their butts, I will sue them and I will collect.

People in government were once dedicated, patriotic, hard-working, rational and kind. Now they are by and large not any of these things.

People in Congress always try to be kind but they are not kind to each other. That is the problem.
Do you log on to ACCESS HOLLYWOOD or tune into the program and really, really believe that whether Angie and Brad are back together again or whether Charlie Sheen is tearing up the town can change your life? Some do.

Well, Congress is not supposed to be like that, but it is. Whether Barack Obama decided to do a bust of terrorists RIGHT BEFORE an election when federal agents have been doing a sting watching them for some time or whether they busted these terrorists a week later is a purely political decision.
These guys weren't planning anything for the next three days. They were doing their thing. Federal agents were watching terrorists. Even when acts of terrorism have been perpetrated, if there were actual bombs found in actual places, the government often used to merely raise the terror threat level from one code color to ratchet it up, and in order to be most effective, they would keep the information from the public so that a more thorough investigation and more effective arrests could be made.

That does not mean that arrests are not being made or that plots are not being foiled and that bombs are not being defused. The release of information in the course of a police investigation is not a requirement. In fact, it is often a liability to release the information because sometimes premature release of information makes terrorists stop for a while and go into hiding and a more effective investigation can be accomplished by not tipping them off.

Here is how the same principles might operate in a local police investigation.

For example, if there is a group o drug dealers in an apartment building and the police send undercover agents to bust them, the actual bust does not have to be done when other people are at home and the actual warrant does not have to be served during the Superbowl game on a Sunday afternoon, but it is sometimes more effective to quietly do a bust and spirit the characters away, then perhaps sit in the same apartment, still posing undercover as friends of the drug dealer to discover and bust the bigger suppliers.
There are many bad and many good reasons to release information on government investigations to the public. For one thing, even in science, let alone political intelligence, one should not claim discoveries where they do not exist.

The "weapons of mass destruction" intelligence information of British Intelligence, for example, which may not have been either scientifically accurate nor reliable. British intelligence is to intelligence as British Petroleum is to petroleum mining, Americans are now finding out, and the British have been doing more harm, both intentional and unintentional since the War of 1812 as the sun has indeed been setting on their empire since 1776. So releasing that bit of info or allowing them to do unsound offshore drilling is about as wise as letting them anywhere near the White House during the War of 1812, the later bravery of Churchill notwithstanding.
Yes, the Brits have played a major part in our history, most of it consisting of being kicked out or marginalized and as much as I adore Shakespeare, Donne, and God knows, Wordsworth, one's leaders have nothing to do with one's culture and the Brits, as any Irishman will tell you, are not very trustworthy, and as my fellow Alexandrian, George Washington told the world, not very good leaders, thank you.
Well, he had a few more choice words about the Brits. George Washington was an American and the problem with Americans today is that they have forgotten who they are. They have been so manipulated by self-serving politicians like Bill Clinton into defining corporate globalism as an international religion that they do not know who they are anymore.

Getting back to information.

The President can choose to release or not release information at any time, no matter what stage of a criminal investigation may be in progress. There are bad reasons as I stated, such as entering a war with inaccurate evidence or intelligence reports from unfriendly foreign intelligence. Unfriendly in the sense that the United States and Great Britain are economic rivals and if Great Britain has been deprived of its largest colony and most of its vast empire, it needs its allies to commit troops, money and energy into fighting its own wars for its own purposes so that it can stimulate its overburdened, moribund economy while profiteering from lucrative U.S. government Defense contracts and NATO production agreements while freeing up its small economy into making nice leather goods and other such consumer products with snob appeal as the shirts sold through the brand name Thomas Pink at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington.
As far as the Brits are concerned, we are still their ignorant, classless colony. The one that got away when a band of terrorists with rather large homes in Virginia decided to simply take up arms and start, oh yes, a rebellion.

Anyone who studies international law knows that revolution is in they eye of the beholder and if Americans think the Fourth of July marks a revolution, the Crown, as the Brits are fond of calling its government, holds Americans to be a band of terrorists. To the various and sundry assorted snobs in their ruling class, also referred to as The Establishment, the rest of the world other than they are merely so much White Trash, wogs, blacks, and Irishmen. The French are another matter, and I must say when it comes to everything but Judaeo-Christian morality the French are clearly the Brits’ superiors and the Brits know it because most of them are indeed French rather than Anglo-Saxon.

We are now getting into the realm of various European tribesmen, fierce warriors, not unlike the Hmong Tribesmen during the Vietnam War, who were responsible for sacking Rome and putting an end to the Roman Empire after cracks began to appear on the Appian Way.
Yes, there are bad reasons for releasing information or unwise reasons or immoral reasons, like starting a war for fun and political or corporate profit.

If that happened the perpetrators were the Brits, and by that I mean old James Bond and British Intelligence.
They succeeded in manipulating our government into entering a war based on faulty or perhaps manufactured intelligence. And releasing that evidence was based on a bad reason because the evidence was baseless and most likely inadequately vetted by incompetent intelligence officers.

If attending Oxbridge is a basic qualification for entering British Intelligence, then the natural result of such an elitist vetting process is the image of Kim Philby more than ten years after he successfully fled the West, shown as a venerated Hero of the Soviet Union on a commemorative stamp, wearing oversized glasses and a plaid jacket looking very much like the late George Burns minus a cigar.

Philby was indeed recruited at Cambridge along with Burgess and MacLean, his two gay classmates, by the KGB.

Now, getting back to reasons for the release of intelligence information to the public.

The timing of such information is purely a political decision and the reason for any political decision is to benefit the political party in power, not the opposition.

What politicians do is run for office to gain political power for good reasons, like defeating a less than competent incumbent or an incumbent's political party, then try to retain the power of public office obtained and transferred from the electorate, for bad ones. If an officeholder is ineffective and weak, that officeholder tries to use every trick in the book to survive the polls, and that means manipulating public information for all it's worth.

It means feeding the voters what intelligence officers call "disinformation," also synonymous with "lies" and manufactured intelligence, which is also synonymous with "lies" through government public public affairs officials among whom truth is a flexible term with many gradations of meaning, the obverse of what the concept of "snow" means to Alaskan Eskimos in their language where there are so many terms for it that no one really knows what to call the kind one is looking at not, unlike the various political parties in France.
What I am getting back to is that the process of determining what is public or not public information and what is or what is not truth has been subsumed to the activity of creating and marketing designer truth manufactured by aggressive competing marketing departments of competing brands who are highly paid to look for ways to sell the brand name, Big D or Big R, and what kind of political fashions these marketers can manipulate to stay in power. The object is to label and market Label Obama, as one White House PR person termed it, I think it was Michele Obama's PR person, who called her efforts, "building the Obama brand" as if the First Lady were a Mars bar or a soft drink or worse, a type of cattle whose large butt has been affixed by a branding iron with the word "Obama."

The release of public information in America today is the same as the release of public information carefully orchestrated and designed to sell a movie. There are trailers, there are posters, items in gossip columns, links on youtube, a website, fan magazines, and ACCESS Hollywood.

When Diana McLellan wrote that Washington was Hollywood with ugly people she was right. Hollywood was marketed to the world by Louis B. Mayer and now Washington is marketing Hollywood back to us in such ugly forms as former Vice Presidential hopeful John Edwards' campaign videos on You Tube. Whether you think Obama’s speech on terror and his discoveries is a docudrama or a documentary is your own political decision, not the government‘s.