Foreign.

I'm Darian Slayton Fleming and thank you for joining me on get what YOU need and feel good about it. Do you find it difficult to ask for what you need? Do you frequently feel misunderstood? Do you have a problem or cause that you would like to learn to manage more effectively? What makes it so hard for us to tell each other how we feel and how do we speak up for ourselves so we get what we need and feel good about it? How do we do this respectfully so that we honor the needs and feelings of others? Together, we'll explore tips, strategies and resources that, when used mindfully and consistently, will improve our results and enrich our relationships. Hello and welcome back to GET what YOU NEED and feel GOOD about It. Today I am joined by Ron Brooks and I will tell you a little bit about him after I welcome him. So welcome to my podcast, Ron.

Thanks Darian. I'm happy to be here.

Thank you so much. As you know, I'm doing a series on documentation and Ron is involved in the public transit industry. So I thought it would be interesting as we go through this interview to talk about how we can help ourselves get more satisfactory outcomes out of our transportation experiences by using documentation. But Ron has a wealth of experience and knowledge and we're going to get right into learning. About Ron Ron Brooks is a graduate of Indiana University. He is a 30 year veteran of the public transit industry where he focuses on making bus, rail, paratransit and other services accessible and equitable for everyone, including people with disabilities.

I am a blind person who uses a guide dog. I live in Phoenix, Arizona and I am married, been married to Lisa for about almost 28, 29 years. I have three kids who are growing up. My youngest is now in college and you know, have a really, really full and happy life. A big part of that is 30 years in public transit. I grew up in Indiana and grew up in a small town, working class family and lost my eyesight. I was, I was born with visual impairments, lost my eyesight at age 14 playing basketball and had an injury while I was doing that and so really became an adult as a blind person. So I never had the opportunity to drive a car, which in the town where I grew up was really the best way to get around. It was not a we didn't have a very large public transit system. We did have buses and I did learn how to use the bus a little bit as I was kind of finishing high school. I went off to college, I went to a bigger city, graduated from Indiana University in Indianapolis, actually, I was on the Indianapolis campus where we had pretty good public transit, at least by Indiana standards. And then I went out to California for graduate school and I was in San Francisco, and I was using public transit all the time. And public transit in the Bay Area, and this is back about 1990, so really right as the Americans with Disabilities act came into it came into effect and was starting to impact how public transit works. And back in those days, public transit was really difficult to use. It still has challenges, but in those days it was harder. And it was sort of one of those things where I had a love hate relationship. I was studying international relations, had no interest in public transit other than that I loved to use it to get to all the places that I needed and wanted to get to. And I hated the fact that it was hard, that drivers didn't always call my stops, that I didn't always make my connections, that sometimes it was really, really crowded, it was hard to find a seat. Yeah, all the things that people typically talk about when they're using public transit. And I was doing advocacy at the time. I was a member of the American Council of the Blind. I was a member of one of the local chapters in the Bay Area. And I was approached by somebody in the chapter who said, hey, there's this meeting for bart, and BART is the Bay Area Rapid Transit District. It's kind of the regional subway train service that runs around in the Bay Area. And they had a meeting that people could attend to make comments about their service for people with disabilities. Would you go? And I was happy to go because I had so many thoughts about what was wrong with it and how it could be better. And I figured it would be a good chance to give them my opinions. And so I went to the meeting, and I think I partly went because they had free cookies and I was a grad student and food was always helpful. But I. I went to the meeting and I actually found that I've. That the subject matter was interesting, the challenges they were trying to solve were interesting. And the other thing that was interesting to me is I came from Indiana, so I came from a place where people. Smaller community, where people tended to talk directly to each other and where there was a lot of give and take. So people, you have very common Midwest values. You sit, you listen, you try to find common ground, you try to work out and cooperate and compromise. And what I heard in this meeting were very strong advocates demanding their rights, which of course is good. And I heard transit agency people trying to defend their decisions And I felt that these people had good intentions, but some of their decisions weren't very helpful. And it seemed to me that they were sort of talking past each other and not hearing each other and not finding common ground and not getting to a consensus. So I found that it was cool to be a person who could kind of hear both sides a little bit and go, hey, what about this? Here are areas where we agree, here are things where there could be some horse trading to maybe find common ground and maybe move forward. And so I went back to the meeting several times because I did find it interesting. And I. And I found that I actually liked the subject matter. I was interested and over time I was able to make some suggestions that actually helped the group find some common ground and move forward on a couple of things. And the staff at the agency decided that when they had an opening for an entry level planner to do some work on bart's accessibility program, they were just starting to do some significant work to make their system more accessible. Because of the ADA that had just passed, they gave me an opportunity to come in as an entry level planner. My degree program was kind of stalled. I wasn't really getting done and I was running out of money. So I said, hey, this is good. I'll take this job and see where it goes. And that was 30 years ago. Actually, it's a little bit more than 30 years ago now. I started, I fell in love with the industry, and I've been in the industry ever since. Since that time, of course, I got married. We moved all over the country with my career. I've lived in Florida, I've lived in Illinois, I've lived in New Mexico, not necessarily in this order. Back to the Bay Area for a hot minute. And then we've been down in Phoenix since 2006. I've done a little bit of everything. I've worked for public transit agencies. I've worked for private companies that provide service on behalf of public agencies. And I've had my own company, which we'll talk about a little bit more. So just to kind of talk about how I got into the space I'm in today, this was now about 2019. So 2019, I was working for the public transit agency here in the Phoenix metropolitan area where I live. And I was overseeing paratransit and some other related services to paratransit for this region. And I was a little frustrated because I couldn't do the things I wanted to do. I believed by this point that we should do better with paratransit. That we had new technology that we could make paratransit better. It could be more on demand. We didn't need to have people calling a day in advance and, and sitting around waiting for vehicles to show up and, and then taking these long, circuitous trips with lots of stops. I just felt like we could do better. And I had an opportunity to go work for a company that was just getting started with a pilot kind of service. I mean, it wasn't a pilot. It was something they'd been doing in other spaces, but they were starting to get into public transit, trying to do on demand paratransit. So the idea that you would just simply request a trip, a vehicle would be sent, like an Uber or a Lyft or a taxi. It would be immediately sent. You could just take your trip. And they. They offered me a job to be their North American business development lead. So basically trying to sell this product to the transit industry, it was going to be a great job. I was going to make a lot of money selling this service. It was a service I believed in. So I took the job. I left the public sector, went to the private sector and got started. Well, about five months after that, we had this thing called Covid, and everything got locked down. All of the work that we were doing, the meetings that we were having with transit agencies to try to sell this product stopped. People stopped traveling because we were in lockdown. The company stopped making money because there was nobody to transport. So they started laying people off. I saw the writing on the wall. I stuck with it. Probably about a year and a half into Covid, maybe not quite that long. About nine months into Covid, got a call, and everything, of course, was virtual. Got invited onto a Zoom call with our HR manager and my boss, which is never a good combination. And I was. I was invited to accept a severance agreement and move on my way. So I took the severance agreement, spent the weekend kind of commiserating about my situation. And then I remembered that for years I had been talking with my wife about being a consultant, because by this point, now we're into 2021. I'd been in the industry almost 30 years, about 28 years. I had a lot of experience. I had a lot of relationships. I had a lot of knowledge. Why not do my own thing? Because nobody was hiring me. Nobody was hiring anybody in 2021. So I. I was sitting at my kitchen table here in Phoenix on a nice day in May, and I started Accessible Avenue, did the paperwork, put the company together, and got started I remember the first. And I. I said may. Actually, it was March. It was not me. I was sitting here trying to figure out what to do and, you know, and we'll talk more about that. But. But basically the first thing I did was literally call every person I knew in the industry and ask them to give me a contract because I had no money. I had a severance agreement that had a little bit of money, but it wasn't going to last long, so I had to get going pretty quick. So that's one thing that I do. So I have Accessible Avenue. It's a company and it still exists. We provide advice, consulting and training to the transportation industry on how they can make transportation better and more accessible for people with disabilities. I have a small group of clients that I work with to do that work. I enjoy it. However, it is not in. It is in and of itself. It's not enough to pay the bills. It is. It's been a slow start. So I also. I had a company that is actually doing what the company that let me go started to do, but this company is doing it. It's a company called Userv and Userville. I was doing some consulting with them as they were getting started. I went to them and said, hey, you know, I really could use a stable employment because I need benefits and I love your product and I love what you guys are doing in the. In the industry. They gave me an opportunity. And so in addition to having my own company, I also am senior Director of Policy and Stakeholder Engagement for Userf, and I've been doing that since 2022, and I really enjoy both roles a lot.

Thank you so much. And you mentioned indirectly and interestingly enough, some of your challenges as you went through this process. What barriers have you faced as you pursue your goals and how do you overcome them?

I think the first thing I would say about barriers is they kind of are what you make them. So one of the things that I've learned is that things that seem impossible today may not be impossible tomorrow. And sometimes it's really just as simply as simple as how you define the problem. So, for example, one of the barriers I think that all of us face is technology. Is it accessible? Is it not accessible? Can we use it? Can we not use it? And I remember earlier in my adult life, and really up until recently of having this opinion that, well, this product's not accessible and it was based on the fact that I couldn't use it with my screen reader or my voiceover on my iPhone, that it's not accessible. And what I've come to learn is two things. One is it may not be accessible today, but it might be accessible tomorrow. The second thing I've learned is that a lot of times what I thought was not accessible was really more a case of me not knowing how to do it. By changing the question from an assumption that it's not to one of how can I make this work? Is there something I can learn? Is there something I can read? Is there someone I can ask? A lot of times things that weren't accessible before are becoming accessible. And that's really helpful because in transit and I'm sure in all industries and in all walks of life, yet new products get invented all the time. They get introduced and they create challenges and they create and they force us who use assistive technology and who have to adapt, they force us to have to do that to adapt. And I'll use Google sheets and Google Slides and Google Docs as an example. I resisted using those while Userv, the company that I work for, they're in a Google environment. They all use Macs and they love Google and I use them. I use a Windows based computer and like Microsoft and that's how I've always used it and it always seemed like it was more accessible to me. What I'm learning is that if I just take the time to learn, I can use these tools. It's harder at first, it's stressful a little bit, but it can be done. I think part of it is just recognizing the difference between hard and impossible makes a big difference. And by the way, what is hard today is easier tomorrow. I think the second challenge was really learning how to be a business owner. It was really. And there's multiple parts to that. I mean, part of it is learning the details of having a business, learning that you have to submit certain reports and that you have to keep your records and you have to, you know, do those things. But another part of it is attitudinal. It's, it's knowing that, that you have to start yourself. There's nobody to tell you what to do. There's nobody to get you going. You have to get yourself going. And if you have a day where there's not a lot going on, find something to do. Don't just go, oh, I don't have much to do today. I think I'll just lay around and do nothing because tomorrow you're going to want to eat. And the things that I've learned, you know, a couple of coping strategies. One Is. Is surrounding yourself with people that are. That you can learn from, people that can encourage you, people that you can give encouragement to as well. People that will hold you accountable and push you, and people that you can push back. Because we get good at doing things that we do. And the other thing is just do it. There are so many things that I had no idea how to do that. If I had waited until I learned how to do them before trying, I would never have gone anywhere. I had no idea how to do the kind of sales work that I had to do. Literally two days after I got laid off, I didn't know how to go find contract work. I'd never really done that. And I didn't know how to do it. I just said, oh, I really need money. So I'm just going to start asking people. And, you know, I got more sophisticated and learned a little bit more as I went along. But that first day, it was really pretty rough. I just called people and said, hey, I'm hungry. Can you give them a job? I mean, not quite like that, but almost. I think. I think just two other things is. Is sales, you know, just learning how to do influence. I did take some training for that. I put a lot of effort into that so that I can learn and be better and then just, you know, just the practical day to day. Yeah. How do you. How do you learn information that you don't know? You having people that I can ask questions of reading, you know, taking the time to learn things as opposed to just not knowing it. You know, there's effort that goes into that.

Those are such great insights. I really appreciate that. I was struck by your comment about is it that the service or whatever isn't accessible, or is it my skill level and being able to overcome that fear of learning something new? Because every time I learn something new, I grow and my business gets stronger. So tell us about your book and what your purpose was for getting your message out there. And please give us the name of the book.

The book is called All Aboard Conducting Accessible Community Involvement for Public Transit. And the focus of this book is on how public transit agencies and municipal governments can provide accessible community involvement. And that could be anything from how they do meetings and events where the public is invited. It could include how they do virtual meetings to make those more accessible, because they do a lot of them. It can also be how they do just ongoing communication with the public. Things like social media, Facebook pages, online dialogues, their complaint process, all those processes that agencies have to engage with community. So. So the Reason I wrote the book. There's a number of reasons. First off, in every job I've had in the industry, and this is both public and private sector, I've had some. Some responsibility for working with the disability community. So I've staffed advisory committees for transit agencies. You know, those groups of people that get together and tell transit what's broken. I've staffed those. I've created them. Actually, I've designed them for a couple of agencies where I worked and then served as staff for them. Throughout all this work that I've done working with the disability community, I've learned a couple of things. One, I've learned that the community has experience and knowledge that the industry needs, because most of the people in the industry, and especially those making decisions, are not in the disability community. They don't have the experiences we have. They don't know how their decisions impact us, either good or bad. So they really, really need community involvement. In many cases, that community involvement is actually required. So when a transit agency is building something with federal money, they're actually required to get community input. But if the process that they use isn't accessible, they're probably not getting much input from the disability community, even if they want to. We really, really need, as an industry, transit industry, to have accessible community involvement processes in place. That was really why I wrote the book, and I had a co author, her name is Kristen Joiner. And we had a couple of collaborators as well. Good friend of mine, Michelle Whitman, and another good friend, Mary Liz McNamara, who are really experts in disability and in designing processes to be accessible for folks with disabilities, and especially people with intellectual disabilities, people with learning disabilities, which are areas that I didn't have a lot of strength in just because I don't have a lot of experience. So we got together and we wrote this book. And what the book really does is it looks at all of those processes. So the first thing we do is we make a case for why community involvement should be accessible. We then explain how different types of disabilities impact a person's ability to engage with a transit agency in a meeting or on a virtual meeting or in some other way. And then we just go right through practical tips. So we talk about how do you design events to be accessible, how do you design virtual meetings to be accessible, and how do you make your communication channels more accessible? So it's really, really just super practical. Now, the thing I'll tell you is there's always a lesson learned. And for me, the lesson is these processes can benefit other industries. We wrote the book really to be focused on and municipal government. So city and county governments often run transit services. They also build things. And usually when you're building public structures, like, you know, public works projects, there are community involvement requirements there as well. So we wrote this kind of for a government audience. The truth is this, a lot of these techniques could be used by conventions, by trade associations like the hotel trade association or the restaurants or consumer electronics. I mean, you name it. We will probably put this book out again in the future, but in a more general way, so that it's a more general message, but that's in the future. So anyway, that's a little bit about the book. You can find us. I think the show notes will have some links that you can go track it down. We love it when people get the book because then we. We're getting the word out.

Very cool. Since I am doing this series on documentation, how would you suggest that people document their experiences using the public transit platforms and get what they need out of the experience? And while you're on that subject, could you talk a little bit about what. What happens with the complaint? Because I think we're always encouraged to give commendations too, and I've done that. But when we document information and we go through the proper channels for submitting a complaint and nothing ever seems to change, how can you know that your.

Complaint makes a difference in thinking about this process? First off, I just want to come back to. It is so important for transit to hear from the people who use transit, and it is important to hear when transit gets it right, because we want them to understand. The reason for doing commendations, by the way, is not to make transit agencies feel good. I mean, it. It does make them feel good. But that's not the reason that you should do it. The reason that you want to do it is because you want to help them understand what works. Because you can talk about what doesn't work and you can talk about what does work. And what you're saying when you make a compliment is you're saying, this person on this day did their job in a way that worked very well for me. Please keep doing that. So you're giving them a positive message about what they just did. When we file a complaint, what we're telling them is what you did on this day, at this time, on this route did not work. And here are the reasons why it didn't work. So that's really all you're doing when you are commenting on service, is giving them feedback on how they did and hopefully on what would make it better. I'm going to refer to some steps in a process of documenting your experience. But first I want to just say that there is a. We did Accessible Avenue, did a course for an organization called the National Research and Training center on Blindness and Low Vision. It's an organization affiliated with Mississippi State University. And we did a course. It is free. You do not have to pay for it. It is called Gearing up for Transit. You can find it and we'll include a link in the, in the show notes for you, Darian. But basically this training does a couple of things. It teaches people out of and it's an hour long course, maybe about 75 minutes PowerPoint or Word or audio. And in fact my, my wife recorded the audio so you can hear her nice voice, which is much nicer than mine. But this course literally walks people through the requirements that transit operates under, kind of how it works and it talks about what your rights are under the Americans with Disabilities act and what you can expect. And then it talks about how to make a good compliment or complaint. The course actually includes sample forms which have all of the details that a transit agency would need to properly investigate a compliment or a complaint so that they can actually determine who did it, what happened, and whether or not it was good, bad or needs to change. So I would encourage you to check that out if you're interested. Again, it's free. Let me walk you through a little bit of that process. The first thing I'm going to say is please understand what you can expect because sometimes people have expectations that while they might be reasonable, they may not match with what the program's rules are. This happens a lot in paratransit where people, where the rules are kind of complicated and people think it should work a certain way, but it doesn't. Sometimes what they're actually frustrated by is actually the rules of how the program works. And it's not to say that you shouldn't comment on those things, but you may want to approach them in a different way because if staff is following their own rules, they're not going to see that as a valid complaint. They're going to see that as well. We were just doing our job. That's exactly it. That's what it says we're going to do. In that case, you may want to be talking to the people who made those rules, which is typically a transit agency board of directors. So the first thing is to know what you can expect. It's helpful to know what you can expect because Then your expectations are going to be more accurate. Now, when you're using transit or paratransit and you have a bad experience, and if you have a good experience, it's really just as simple as the day, the time, the driver, what happened, and why you liked it, that's. That's enough for an experience that's not so great. What you want to do first off is you want to. You want to keep some kind of a. Of a record of that experience. And you can do this in a lot of ways. You can write it down, you can use the Notes app in your phone, you can make a voice recording and just talk about what happened. But the things that the agency needs typically are going to be the date that it happened, on the approximate time that it happened. And the closer the better. Because if you're in a system where there's lots of buses running on a particular route, you need to get as close as possible so they can actually identify which particular bus it was, the starting and ending location where your trip began and ended, so that they can actually tie it to that location in that trip. And then just a description of what happened, why was it a bad experience, and what would have made a better experience. Those are the kind of details that can really help you help your transit agency investigate the complaint or the incident to try to find out what happened and what could have gone better and how to fix it. If it is a safety complaint or if it is a complaint where you believe the agency has violated a federal law like the Americans with Disabilities act, you want to actually tell them that. And the reason for that is safety complaints get escalated. They usually get investigated more quickly. And if it is an American Disabilities act complaint, there are particular rules that agencies have to meet when investigating those complaints. So those are things that you want to kind of keep track of. And again, all of that detail is in the course that I told you about Gearing up for Transit. That's a resource that's available to you. Now, I want to talk about another kind of group of complaints, and this is ride shares. So think about services like Uber or Lyft, or if you are lucky enough to be in a city where the company I work for, User of, Operates, user. These are rideshare companies. These are companies that transit agencies use a lot of who are providing service. This is where you use an app and a driver comes to you in their own vehicle and they give you a trip with those services. The thing to keep in mind is, is keep your own journal. But also remember that your app tracks your history so you don't actually have to write down a bunch of trip details because your app already has it. What you need to do is just write down in your journal the things that maybe happened that aren't so great so that you can have a record of those, because your app won't keep that. With these services, they're under different rules. They do have to meet ADA requirements. However, by using those services, you've agreed probably to their own complaint procedures and maybe arbitration. So you want to, you want to read those terms of service when you use the app, when you got the app in the first place, look at those terms of services and make sure you understand what you've agreed to by using that service. And they typically will have procedures outlined in their app for how you can make a complaint or how you can try to get help. Every one of these services is also regulated by somebody. So there's a government agency that regulates rideshare providers in your state and possibly in your city. So you want to check those out because those agencies are also places where you can file complaints. If a ride share provider has not done right by you, maybe you have a guide dog and they've denied your trip. You know, there's regulators who oversee them. They are typically stated in. Sometimes, like in New York City, it's at the city level, so you can check those out. And usually in, in those cases, there is a way that you can file a complaint online.

Very helpful information. Thank you. Do you have any additional parting words of advice or encouragement for our listeners about documentation or using transit?

I think I'm going to just talk about things that I've learned and I think these apply more than just to transit or services like that. These, these to me are things that have helped me in lots of spaces, including transit. The first is to be curious. Don't assume, and I did this for a long time. I, I would assume the worst of a situation. So if, if things happened in a way that was not the way I wanted them to, I would sort of assume that people did it to me, that it was personal or that. Or that it was unfair and it was based on my disability. For example, start with curiosity. Don't assume that you know why somebody did something. Don't assume that it was personal. Don't assume that they don't like disabled people or they don't like you or the system is rigged. Don't assume any of those things. Start with curiosity, which is a. Why. It's a question of why did this happen and try to understand the why before you jump to conclusions. Now, it's possible that it is broken and it is bad and it needs to be fixed and they did take negative actions. But if you can start from curiosity, you can learn more before you start jumping to conclusions. When you need to take action or you need to call somebody out, focus on their actions and not their motives. And this is really important because I hear this all the time. People say that driver doesn't like blind people with guide dogs. We actually don't know what a driver's motives are. We don't know what a transit agency's motives are when they make a mistake. We don't know that big companies don't care about blind people when they create a product that we can't use. What we do know is that the driver made a mistake or the big company made a mistake and produced a product that we can't use. If we can focus on the thing that they did as opposed to what we think they or why we think they did it, we can focus on the action. And as soon as you focus on the action, you can then start thinking about what would a better solution look like. And that goes to my next point, which is being ready to explain what you need or what would work better for you. If you can tell somebody instead of saying, you know, you. You did this thing and it was terrible. If you could say, you know, I love this service and I need it to work a certain way in the future, could you do this instead? Instead you might find that you get a better response. And it's certainly a lot easier to tell somebody what you need and have them do it than to tell them what you don't like and have them figure it out from there. And the last thing I would say is never forget that progress is happening. Sometimes it seems like it's not, or it's really slow, but it's happening. There's so much more accessibility now than there was 30 years ago. For the largest part, computers are more accessible now than they used to be. Phones are more accessible. Sometimes it's easy to forget that and to focus on what still needs to be fixed. But if you are old enough to look back 30 or more years to where we used to be, things are a lot, lot more accessible than they were back then. And it's amazing to me the things that we're able to do now that were not possible then, like reading mail or ordering food to be delivered to our house or ordering a trip that shows up in eight minutes. The fact is, 30 years ago you had to call on a phone to a taxi and wait for some undetermined amount of time. Things have gotten better and we need to just remember that they are continuing to get better and we need to just stay focused on that progress.

Very good points and so encouraging to think about what we can do and what the facts are about the actions rather than focusing on the perceived motives. Thank you so much. In closing, Ron has provided us with a quote that I find really interesting. Here it goes. The average person will live for 4,000 weeks, about 80 years. There's not enough time in 80 years to do everything that society, our bosses, our friends, our families and we demand of ourselves. It's necessary to recognize this and let a lot of things go. The only real question is which things do we give up? That was in a book written By Oliver Berkman, 4000 weeks time management for mortals. Letting go of of things that we can't control and working on what we can do seems to be part of that message. Thank you very much Ron for joining us. I was really taken with this interview and I wish you well and people will catch up with you when they listen to this podcast and read the show notes. And thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Thank you everyone for joining. Get what you need and feel good about it and we will have another episode for your in February. Take care. Thank you for joining me today on get what you need and feel good about it. Remember, when you speak up for yourself assertively, you will get what you need and feel good about it. You will also be showing respect for yourself and for the other people in your life who are important to you. Until next time, try thinking about it. Like Stephanie Lahart says it say what you mean, mean what you say, but.

Don'T say it meant. Got it? Yes. The only way to do this is with hope, not me.