Northern Calif. paratransit wins award

[IMAGE]SantaRosaParatransit-Award-PhotoFULL.jpg[/IMAGE] Santa Rosa Paratransit, a division of the City of Santa Rosa Transit Department, was recognized as the 2010 Outstanding Paratransit Program by the California Association of Coordinated Transportation (CalACT).

The award was presented at the CalACT Annual Awards presentation at their 2010 Spring Conference and Expo, at the Hyatt Regency, San Francisco on April 20, 2010.

Over the past five years, Santa Rosa Paratransit staff has been dedicated to improving all aspects of the paratransit service provided to the residents of Santa Rosa.

In particular, incredible improvements have been made in the following areas:

• Operations, including the incorporation of Trapeze scheduling software, installing mobile data terminals and Automatic Vehicle Locator (AVL) systems to link with Trapeze.

• Safety, with the installation of emission reduction devices which reduced particulate matter emissions by 40 percent (compared to 2005 levels) and Nitrous Oxide (NOx) by 3.2 g/bhp-hr.

• Quality Assurance: with the implementation of a Functional Testing Program to ensure that the City's ADA complementary Paratransit service was, indeed, reserved for only those who could not utilize fixed route service.

• Public Perception: through improving quality of service reliability. Staff has also continued to strengthen relationships with the disabled community by facilitating community ivolvement and education through the Paratransit Users' Group (PUG), travel training seminars, the development and publication of educational literature and by including representatives from the disabled community in appropriate programs and projects.

"Santa Rosa Paratransit is to be congratulated for taking on the challenge of system-wide upgrades, and most especially for striving to achieve and maintain a high level of quality service delivery that is a local asset," said Janet Spilman, deputy of planning and public outreach, Sonoma County Transportation Authority.

"The most spectacular project in this program probably was our insisting on an upgraded reservation and routing procedure. The reservation system now is completely computerized and every call is registered and filed. Schedules, routes and individual bus-ride manifests are printed out and all these records are accessible," said T. J. O'Leary, Paratransit Users' Group. "Today "on-time" performance statistics are at almost 99 percent. And we haven't heard about a missed bus ride in years now."