Evolving Paratransit Services

As a service, it is essential for paratransit to evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of its customers, and a panel at APTA’s recent Mobility Conference, a panel of experts looked at strategies for integrating paratransit with other services and implementing same day service.

Research has helped to uncover ways to create efficiencies in this particular mode. Todd Hansen, senior transportation planner for the KFH Group said the goal for agencies “is to help increase efficiency of their overall demand response service, increase productivity through greater shared rides, and then lower the cost per trip that they have.” Some of the answer lies with comingling trips with an agency’s regular services. Steve Kuban director of business development for the Routing Company said while modern scheduling and dispatch platforms are a par of the process, so is multimodal integration. “Maybe move riders a mile, get them onto an accessible transit station where they are able to do the rest of their day,” he suggested.

Work in the field is already happening with on-demand paratransit, and much can be learned from analyzing results. In Seattle, Mitchell Brown, the Metro Flex and Access on Demand program director for King County Metro Transit conducted one pilot program with 33 customers taking about one thousand on demand trips after his customers told him it would really change their lives. The trips averaged about 5 miles each with an average wait time of about 30 minutes. “Not surprisingly, customers loved it,” Brown told the audience. They are now in phase two of the study with a larger number of customers and travel miles, trying to learn how they can use non dedicated service providers to help drive cost down and better drive efficiency. In the San Francisco Bay Area, Tina Dubost, manager, Accessible Services for San Mateo County Transit District, is actively running a same day paratransit service. The agency found many customers still pre-planning. The agency would get a huge chunk of reservations at 9 am for trips at 1 pm or later in the day. The service is essential to Dubost because “things do come up at the last minute. People need to go places and so we wanted to give people the option.” The agency, she noted, wanted to be  careful not to deny too many trips. It set a higher price, $10 for regular trips, and $8 for low-income riders. She said contractors loved it, but her agency got surprisingly little feedback from customers and will need to market the program better.

Overall, paratransit continues to struggle with price per trip. But, with better routing, research, integrating with regular transit trips, and a move to more same day trips costs could ultimately be reduced and customers be better served.

View more images from the Mobility Conference here.