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Visually impaired Longview residents push for better transit

They join statewide effort to increase options

By Brennen Kauffman, The Daily News
Published: September 7, 2021, 6:02am

LONGVIEW — Longview residents with disabilities are part of a statewide push for increasing street safety and transportation options.

Nikki Palm is a Longview mother and organizer for the Ability Talks support group. Palm and her husband are both legally blind, which compounds the existing challenges faced by people who cannot drive themselves around.

“We tend to have to pay more for things and find workarounds for things that other people don’t have to deal with,” Palm said.

Palm was one of several Cowlitz County residents interviewed for a new project by the Disability Mobility Initiative. The subgroup of Disability Rights Washington last week released the report, “Transportation Access for Everyone,” about the current status of public transportation and navigation for Washingtonians with disabilities.

The report included interviews from more than 120 state residents representing all 49 legislative districts who were nondrivers due to disabilities or old age.

Initiative director Anna Zivarts said she was struck by the similarities of the concerns raised by people in Seattle and La Center about dangerous sidewalks and limited public transit. For Longview and more remote sections of the state, Zivarts said the trade-off for a lower cost of living or family support was often a less robust transit infrastructure.

“Almost everyone we talked to dreamed of living somewhere that has sidewalks and frequent bus service. But it is super expensive,” Zivarts said.

Longview public transit

By some measures, Longview is fairly accessible for residents who can’t drive. RiverCities Transit offers a number of bus routes across Longview and Kelso, along with paratransit rides on request through RiverCities LIFT. Palm said the city government seems to be responsive to concerns about making sidewalks and crosswalks easier to navigate, though she hoped they would continue adding auditory cues to key intersections.

Her complaint was about the limited hours offered by RiverCities. Palm relies on rides from relatives weekday mornings to make it to the school where she student teaches this year. Evening events pose a similar challenge, as the fixed-route buses and paratransit calls stop at 7 p.m. during the week and 6 p.m. on weekends.

“If my daughter wants to pay a sport this fall, I can get her there after school but I can’t give her a ride back,” Palm said.

LIFT provided 55,000 individual rides for paratransit customers in 2019. That ridership was cut in half last year amid the pandemic.

Grethel Farmer can make out the outlines of things in bright light, but is legally blind. The Kelso resident got to know Palm through Ability Talks meetings over the last two years.

Farmer mainly relies on her husband and door-to-door paratransit rides from LIFT to get around town. Farmer said she went through one day of “mobility training” to learn to navigate Kelso on her own, but that did not keep her from being scared by the risks of longer walks.

“I’m not that good with using my cane to get around and I don’t walk around enough to get familiar,” Farmer said.

She also said she hopes to see transportation options that would connect Longview and Kelso to nearby cities. Her in-laws live in Castle Rock and she had to travel to Rainier to find a dentist covered by her insurance. Disability Mobility Initiative is looking to the state Legislature to fund many of the transportation changes they hope to see across Washington.

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