On Sunday at midnight, the “Grand Central Station of the West” opened, right in our backyard. The new San Francisco Transbay Terminal, now known as the Salesforce Transit Center, is a 4.5 billion dollar, 1 million square foot development project, to include public parks, shops and a hub for the city’s buses, trains and eventually, high-speed rail.
San Francisco is clamoring with excitement about the opulent 1,000 foot facility, marked by the now-famous Salesforce Tower. If you’d like to read about the project, there are plenty of places: the Examiner does a good job describing the new Transit Center inside and out. But at LightHouse, we wanted to offer a hands-on opportunity for our blind community to get to know this fantastic new public resource.
Our LightHouse Training Department is pleased to let you know that LightHouse Orientation and Mobility Specialist(s) will be providing individual 2-hour Orientation Training at no charge to experienced commuters. Orientation will be available Monday through Friday specific to the immediate incoming transit levels and connections to San Francisco transit our blind commuters. If you are a current Blind or Low Vision Commuter has regularly been using the Temporary Transbay Terminal, you may contact our Specialist in two ways. If you have been a student of the LightHouse in the past three years, please email Gina di Grazia as you likely are in our database. If you are brand new to training at the LightHouse we request that you link to our LightHouse Registration Form and register as a new student. Please request Transbay Terminal Orientation in the Program Interest section so that your registration and request is directly linked to our Orientation and Mobility Specialist.
With the good fortune of a Federal Grant, we are able to provide two hours of orientation at no charge during August and September. To reiterate, initially we are targeting those commuters who need to know their routes for their pre-existing needs first. We expect to have a high volume of requests, so if you are already working with a mobility instructor through DOR, please connect with them first. The LightHouse will plan to offer small group orientation tours come the beginning of Fall to get further acquainted with the Sales Force Transit Center, dates will be planned and posted as our interest grows. For those of you who are new to blindness or Orientation and Mobility Training and you are interested in training with the LightHouse, you can get started by emailing info@lighthouse-sf.org.
