This week, Iowa elected Josh Turek to the U.S. Senate. Senator-elect Turek was born with spina bifida, due to his father’s exposure to Agent Orange while serving in the Vietnam War, and has used a wheelchair since childhood. He represented the U.S. in the Paralympics on the men’s basketball team four times, winning the gold medal twice. Turek has been a disability advocate in the Iowa State Legislature and his campaign focused in part on healthcare and workforce challenges for members of the disability community.

Poetically, Turek’s seat –most recently held by retiring Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA)–was held for 30 years by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), the chief author of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Disability rights was a personal issue for Harkin, whose older brother was deaf since childhood due to spinal meningitis. Upon passage of the ADA on July 13, 1990, Senator Harkin delivered the first speech to be given in American Sign Language from the Senate floor.

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 built upon prior legislation including the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and required changes to policies and the removal of barriers that prevent people with disabilities from enjoying equal opportunity. Equal access in transportation is one of the cornerstones of the ADA, which has a specific focus for transit and for intercity passenger rail. ADA requires that rail and transit services provide wayfinding signage and announcements that facilitate navigation by those with vision or hearing impairments, and remove barriers that serve as obstacles to mobility.

The ADA requires transit agencies to provide “paratransit” e.g. origin-to-destination service for people with disabilities in all locations within ¾ of a mile of a fixed-route bus route or light rail station at hours when the transit service is operating. FTA conducts oversight of federal recipients of transit funding to ensure that they’re in compliance with ADA and with Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and cooperates with the U.S. Department of Justice on enforcement.

Section 12162(e) of the ADA requires that all stations in the intercity rail transportation system specifically must be made accessible to and usable by individuals with a disability. For rail stations, achieving accessibility can require a significant level of structural changes. So while the law directed Amtrak to make all of its stations accessible as soon as practicable, it also allowed for a 20-year extension to complete the work. In the end, in the first two decades after passage of ADA, Amtrak made very little progress in complying with the ADA  or the earlier Rehabilitation Act of 1973, citing challenges based largely on the lack of funding. Amtrak’s 2009 Report on Accessibility and Compliance with the ADA reported that 18 years after passage of the ADA only 48 out of 481 stations were 100% compliant.

Another compliance challenge has been the lack of ownership and full control over many stations accessed by Amtrak trains, which impedes work to address accessibility and requires additional coordination between station owners and Amtrak. Ownership and responsibility are now determined using a “separate component” approach, through which each station is divided into three distinct components: station structure, platform, and parking. The ADA applies to each component regardless of ownership, but the obligation for ADA compliance falls to the state or local governments or private companies that own the component of each station. Amtrak now tracks each component’s ADA compliance separately.

Amtrak initiated the ADA Stations Program in 2009 as a comprehensive program to make its stations ADA compliant and accessible. As of April 2023, 110 stations have been made fully compliant for all the elements Amtrak is responsible and another 69 stations are complete for all elements except the platform.

While full compliance is not yet achieved, the level of progress in accessibility has improved in the last fifteen years since Amtrak initiated the ADA stations program. In part this is due to a new level of funding support for ADA compliance. Starting in 2012, Congress began providing dedicated money for Amtrak compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, directing $50 million per year of their annual Northeast Corridor and National Network grants be used to advance work to improve accessibility. The level of ADA set-aside was increased to $75 million in 2021, but Amtrak has consistently exceeded that minimum spending requirements due to the increase in overall funding under IIJA. For instance in FY25, Amtrak dedicated $182 million to station accessibility upgrades.

IIJA also expanded funding for accessibility at FTA, through the All Stations Accessibility Program, which provided $350 million per year. That program provided discretionary grant funding to rail fixed guideway systems to upgrade accessibility for people with disabilities.

Both the funding for Amtrak and the FTA All Stations Accessibility Program were funded as part of the dedicated funding under Division J of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. So while portion of the IIJA have been extended through December 11 of this year, the funding for these programs has not been extended and instead was allowed to expire on September 30^th. With Congress returning and looking to renew infrastructure spending in the lame duck and next year, funding for accessibility programs will be one issue that needs to be addressed.