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More than 100 kids and young people recorded safety messages for transit systems in New York and other major U.S. cities as part of the Autism Transit Project. The Autism Transit Project highlights the special bond children with autism often have with mass transit systems.
The Autism Transit Project was founded by Jonathan Trichter, who spent the first 30 years or so of his career in communications, investment banking, corporate restructuring and venture capital.
In 2019, after his personal life was touched by autism, Jonathan opened a small alternative day program for children on the spectrum. The program took off and now he administers six special needs schools in New York, Connecticut, Washington, and Virginia. Some of those schools had been slated to close before Jonathan purchased and restructured them so that they could thrive and deliver the best-in-class modern therapies that can change lives and futures. He has plans for opening more schools and currently employs over 200 special ed teachers, therapists and passionate providers to numerous children who need these therapies to reach their maximum potential.
From this involvement and his own personal experience, Jonathan learned that behaviors common to autistic children include intense focus on feats of mechanical engineering that most of us encounter in our everyday lives but largely ignore. This includes mass transit systems and, for whatever reason, trains—especially. The phenomenon is well known to frontline transit workers who see these kids every day dragging their parents on joy rides or asking them questions that can be so complex as to leave them stumped! The phenomenon has also been documented in this wonderful article in The New York Times (some in that article later wound up at Jonathan’s schools.)
Often these children come to language differently than neurotypical kids. They may struggle to communicate with their peers and parents. But to connect through language is a big part of our shared human experience. So these kiddos latch on to what language they focus on. For those who perseverate over all things transit, this may often be the announcements they hear repeatedly in an environment where they spend so much of their time and energy.
Indeed, it is not at all uncommon for the first full sentence an autistic child utters to be something like, “Stand clear of the closing doors please!” They can latch onto that and use it as other kids babble. Through it, they will learn how to communicate with those around them. They will learn how to interact with the outside world and take part in civic life.
The service announcements that you hear every day in the subway have a different, deeper meaning for these kids. As a result, it dawned on Jonathan in 2022 for Autism Awareness Month to have autistic children in New York City record the regular public service announcements for the Metropolitan Transit Agency. He recorded a number of children for the project, and the MTA allowed their announcements to be played throughout the subway system for a day in April. The project was a hit and inspired a local news story about it all.
The next year, in 2023, Jonathan enlisted five of the largest transportation agencies in the country to participate in what he came to call the Autism Transit Project (“ATP”). Over 100 children recorded announcements for their local transit systems. The project received widespread media attention from national and local news outlets.
ATP became so big that Jonathan recently formed a 501c3 non-profit for which he hopes to raise funds to broaden the scope of ATP in order to include other countries with state-of-the-art mass transit systems but more mixed histories when it comes to accepting neurologically diverse populations into everyday society. Jonathan also hopes to create workforce partnerships with transit agencies that can turn disabilities into career opportunities for individuals with Autism.
