ACTA: Advisory Committee for Transit Accessibility

 Abigail Alvarez is a transportation planning practitioner with a dedicated focus on making cities safe, inclusive, and accessible to everyone. She holds a Master's in City and Regional Planning and a certificate in Women’s Leadership from Rutgers University. She currently serves as a New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC) 9/11 Memorial Transportation Research Fellow at the New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT).  

Additionally, she is joining the next cohort of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey’s (PANYNJ) Leadership Fellow program. Abigail’s professional experience in equity-centered transportation planning and placemaking includes experience with the U.S. Department of Transportation, NJ TRANSIT, and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.  

Rasheta Bunting is a blind advocate, community leader, and Executive Director and Co-Founder of One Heart One Vision, Inc., a nonprofit organization that provides community services and support to blind and low vision women from underserved communities throughout New York City and beyond. She also serves as First Vice President of the National Federation of the Blind of New York State, where she advocates for accessibility, independence, and equal opportunities for blind New Yorkers.  

With years of experience in nonprofit leadership and disability advocacy, Rasheta has worked extensively in community outreach, public speaking, and voter engagement and transportation initiatives. Through both her professional leadership and lived experience as a blind woman, she is committed to empowering others and working to impact systemic change. 

Giuseppe (Joe) Floccari is a dispatcher employed by Medical Transportation Management with the accessible dispatch program. He is an avid advocate and activists for people with disabilities. He is on the board of Disabled In Action and a member of ADAPT. As an advocate who regularly attends quarterly ACTA meetings, he believes in the importance of disabled people's visibility with MTA and ability to work behind the scenes to make the MTA more accessible.

Rachel Frumin has been a public servant in NYC government for over 15 years, most recently as a Director of Concessions and Franchises for NYC Department of Transportation (DOT). With an educational background in city and regional planning, her work focuses on long and short term activation of public plazas and open streets, compliance oversight of concession and franchise agreements, and oversees Automated Public Toilets as part of DOT's Coordinated Street Furniture Franchise. Since 2018, she was one of the founding members and first elected Chair of DOT's DiverseAbilities Employee Resource Group (ERG) that focus on employees with disabilities and their allies. In this role, she collaborated with other ERGs at DOT and other public agencies to build connections, develop intersectional programming and events, and bring up DEI initiatives to top leaders at the agency. As a lifelong deaf disability advocate, she is interested in building inclusive communities, creating an equitable public realm and advocating for our public transit system to be fully accessible for all users.

Jonathan Hanon is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is researching Public Awareness and Tolerance on Data Privacy in the Digital Era, a cross-disciplinary topic integrating legal policy with data privacy and studying how this relationship affects the public. He is a resident of Inwood and serves as the disability representative to the Uptown People’s Project in coordination with Councilmember Carmen De La Rosa. He received his master's degree from Brooklyn College in 2024 and is a 2017 graduate of Brooklyn College with a bachelor's degree in physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science. He has previously served on the CUNY Board of Trustees Committee on Finance and Administration, and as the Vice-Chair for Technology Affairs on the University Student Senate. He is also a Delegate to the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities (CCSD).

Mark Hughes is a customer experience strategist, transit advocate, and accessibility-focused mobility consultant with decades of experience designing inclusive systems across transportation, technology, and public service sectors. Living with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP), Mark brings both professional expertise and lived experience to his advocacy work surrounding accessibility, mobility, and equitable transit access. 

A frequent participant in Metropolitan Transportation Authority accessibility discussions and an active public advocate for improved rider experience, Mark regularly writes and speaks about the importance of accessible infrastructure, clear communications, frontline service delivery, and customer-centered transit operations. He believes strongly in the importance of disabled voices being represented not only publicly, but also behind the scenes, where policy, planning, and operational decisions are made. 

Through his consulting work with Transit Experience Group, Mark focuses on improving the rider experience for all passengers — particularly seniors, riders with disabilities, and mobility-challenged communities — by helping agencies better connect accessibility, operations, communications, and customer experience into a unified strategy. 

Arthur Jacobs is the President of the New York City Chapter of the National Federation of the Blind of New York. He has been an advocate in the blindness community for 30 years. He also works as New York City’s Digital Accessibility Coordinator. He holds a Master’s Degree in Education from the University of Colorado at Denver. 

Saravanan “Van” Krishnamoorthy, MD, is a former physician and past faculty member at Yale and Columbia Universities who is currently pursuing a Master of Social Work (MSW). Navigating the world as a blind individual, Van is on a mission to create jobs for the blind community and leverage AI to empower marginalized voices. He serves as an advisor for disability AI organizations, including Tactile Navigation Tools (TNT). Through his storytelling, Van explores themes of self-healing, embracing his authentic self, and transmuting anger into agency. 

Emilee Noh is a software engineer and digital accessibility consultant with over eight years of experience building inclusive digital products. She has worked both as an external consultant auditing for compliance and as an in-house ambassador where she has established awareness, educated peers, and secured vital resources for internal a11y programs.  

Emilee is also an avid transportation advocate, with a strong interest in housing and land use reform. As a New Yorker and a technologist, she is excited to bring her technical expertise to the MTA and is honored to contribute to furthering the mission-critical accessibility goals of this system. 

In her spare time, Emilee is learning to tune and regulate pianos. 

Dorothee Pierrard has been an Orientation and Mobility Specialist for over 20 years, including 15 years in New York. She currently works for Visions Services for the Blind in community settings, teaching people with visual impairments how to use public transportation, subways and buses,  throughout the 5 boroughs. She works with individuals in age from 2 to 98 years old, including with multiple disabilities.  

Nadreca Reid is an open-minded and empathetic individual dedicated to building meaningful connections and uplifting others. Originally from Jamaica, she currently resides in the Bronx, New York, and is legally blind due to Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). 

She serves as the Manager of Peer Services at Bronx Independent Living Services (BILS), is an active member of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and is pursuing her Master of Social Work (MSW) degree at Touro University Graduate School of Social Work. With more than 15 years of experience in disability services, Nadreca is committed to advancing access, inclusion, and independence for disabled individuals across New York City. 

As a first-term ACTA committee member, she looks forward to learning more about the committee’s advocacy initiatives while contributing her perspective, sharing her ideas, and serving as a voice for the consumers and communities she supports. 

Michael Ring has lived his entire life in Brooklyn except for the time he had to leave to earn his Master's in Social Welfare from Stony Brook University. In 2014, while preparing for his 20th New York City Marathon, he developed Guillain-Barre syndrome and was rendered almost completely paralyzed. He used a wheelchair for about a year and, although he can currently walk, uses ankle foot orthotics. He is now training for his 25th New York City Marathon with the assistance of Achilles International. As a result of his partial paralysis, it will take him twice as long to complete the race. Michael is currently on the Board of Directors of Disabled in Action of Metropolitan New York. He is a co-coordinator of the Transportation and Voter Accessibility committees for the Downstate New York chapter of ADAPT. Michael is looking forward to returning to his roots in social welfare to help make our city more accommodating for its disabled population.

Jean Ryan is the president of Disabled in Action of Metropolitan NY (DIA) and understands the transportation problems that people with disabilities experience. She used subways for 25 years and had to stop when she could no longer manage subway stairs and became a wheelchair user. As a result, she has used Access-A-Ride for many years as well as express and local buses and occasional accessible taxis and for-hire vehicles. Jean has consistently worked for people with disabilities in all forms of transportation and she looks forward to the day when most people in NYC can take subways. Ms. Ryan has been a driving force behind making taxis and for-hire vehicles accessible through the Taxis for All Campaign. Jean believes in working with organizations to share information, plan and participate in rallies and demonstrations and meet with the media to make positive changes for people with disabilities. 

She has been an avid proponent of civil rights, including racial equality, health care equality, and full access to buildings and services such as drug stores, voting, police stations, parks, City Hall and court houses. For years, Ms. Ryan volunteered in elementary schools as well as served on Community Board 10 in Brooklyn. 

In her spare time, Ms. Ryan is a gardener, reader, loves music, museums and botanical gardens, and enjoys being a grandmother. She has a master's degree in Child Clinical Psychology and a master's in TESOL, Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. She also graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's in Psychology. She won an award from Hunter College for a paper on plagiarism.

Bonnie Schwartz is a quality data analyst in Quality Operations at a major NYC hospital. Additionally, Bonnie is an advocate for accessibility and one of the co-leads for ADAPT, a disability ERG (employee resource group), at her hospital. Prior to working in healthcare, she worked in the landscape architecture field on various commercial projects such as civic plazas, parking lots, parks, and streetscapes. With her background and lived experience as a deaf transit user, Bonnie intends to utilize her knowledge and insight to help improve accessibility for all New York transit users.  

Vannessa is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and a recent PhD graduate in History from Stanford University. A proud native New Yorker, she was born and raised in the Bronx and earned her bachelor's degree from City College (CUNY). Her research focuses on how transportation infrastructure systems have shaped access, opportunity, and environmental conditions in urban America from the late 19th century to the present. 

As a lifelong transit rider, advocate, and now caregiver for family members with disabilities, she has become acutely aware of how vital and delicate accessible transit is to staying connected to both community and care. While writing her dissertation on the other side of the country, she learned to coordinate MTA accessible transit services, navigate the paratransit eligibility process, schedule Access-A-Ride, and troubleshoot trips. That experience has given her a firsthand understanding of the complexities riders with disabilities face, from service reliability and communication gaps to the challenge of finding clear, accurate information about available accommodations. Glad to be back home in New York, she is now eager to put her research, professional, and personal experience to work in the service of a more accessible MTA.