With the demand and costs to provide paratransit services continuing to escalate, many transit agencies have found ways to help curb costs, including partnering with private nonprofit groups and adult day health care facilities as well as subsidizing taxi trips.

By forging these partnerships, which often flourish because of their shared vision to provide transportation options to the elderly and people with disabilities, transit agencies are not only saving money and taking rides off their own paratransit services but also providing those communities with better, more customer-focused services. The financial savings, in turn, is also saving transportation agencies from having to make the ever unpopular decision to make cuts to their fixed-route services.

METRO Magazine spoke to several transit agencies about the successes they have found through paratransit service partnering and subsidizing and the positive impact those practices have had in the areas they serve.

King County Metro Transit
Seattle, Wash.
King County Metro’s Community Access Transportation (CAT) program began as a demo project in 1997 and slowly grew over the years to expand mobility options for people with disabilities and seniors by developing partnerships with community agencies in the region.

Fifty-percent of CAT’s customers are ADA paratransit eligible, with the other 50% ineligible but still either disabled, elderly or economically challenged. There is no certification process for a majority of the services provided through CAT.  

Through King County Metro, CAT has two programs — Advantage and Vanworks — providing some combination of vehicles, maintenance, driver training, insurance and fuel. Advantage agencies are responsible for providing drivers and scheduling, insurance and at least 150 trips per month for CAT eligible customers, while Vanworks agencies must provide drivers and scheduling, backup drivers, bookkeepers, insurance and at least 50 one-way trips per month for CAT eligible customers. There are also grants  available for Advantage agencies to cover fuel, insurance, and administrative costs for nonprofit agencies that serve low-income customers and can demonstrate a need for financial assistance.

“When we first started out, the focus of the program was on underutilized county resources,” says Don Okazaki, CAT program manager/transportation planner for King County Metro. “We would retire our Access vans when they had up to two years of service life left, but when they were used for CAT program where they aren’t used as much, we could get five or six years out of them. It was a very low cost program to start.”

The agencies for both programs benefit because they can customize their transportation services to meet their clients’ needs.  

“The initial focus was to create a program to fill gaps in service, and as we saw it was much more cost effective than Access, there was obvious benefits to expanding it,” says Okazaki.

From 2007 to 2012, the number of CAT vans has gone from 53 to 100 with boardings going from 141,368 to 312,795 passengers, 52% of which are non-ADA registered riders. Meanwhile the average cost per ride on King County Metro’s Access has gone from $36.15 to $44.59 from 2007 to 20012, with the current average cost per ride on CAT holding steady at around $5.02. When comparing the cost to provide trips on Access versus CAT, King County Metro’s projected annual cost savings has nearly quadrupled, going from $1.3 million saved in 2007 to $5.1 million saved in 2012.

Okazaki explains that while the money King County Metro saves is nice, the CAT program’s success is its ability to provide better options.

“The focus is to still provide transportation for people in the region, so these rides CAT is providing, whether they are taking riders off of our Access services or not, enable King County Metro to provide mobility to the community,” he says. “That is truly our focus — the mobility — and not exactly the cost savings.”

Due to the slumping economy, growth of the CAT program has slowed since King County Metro has fewer funds to put toward expansion. Okazaki explains, however, that the agency is still open to taking on more partners.
“We kind of froze the list in the last couple of years because we didn’t have any more money for vehicles or operating expenses,” he says. “What we have done, then, is begin targeting more of the larger agencies that could do the community or neighborhood shuttles and urge them to apply for state grants, so we could then look into providing them with the matching funds and vehicles.”[PAGEBREAK]

Orange County Transportation Authority (OCTA)
Orange, Calif.
In the early 2000s, OCTA began seeing year-over-year double-digit growth on its ACCESS paratransit services due to the rapidly aging population. To help address that growth as well as the financial strain it began to pose on OCTA, the agency launched a comprehensive paratransit growth management study from 2003 to 2004, which focused on finding strategies it could employ to help better manage its services.

“Looking at our comprehensive business plan and forecasting out, we saw that if we didn’t do something to manage the growth and expense of our paratransit service, it would put our whole transit system in jeopardy,” says Dana Wiemiller, OCTA’s manager, community transportation services.

Wiemiller adds the upshot of the study was OCTA knew it wouldn’t discover a “silver bullet” but rather find a number of different strategies to rein in costs to make ACCESS services more manageable and sustainable.

Following the study, OCTA put together a growth management plan and stopped providing paratransit services beyond the required three-quarter mile corridor as well as extending its pickup window from 20 minutes to 30 minutes.

Next, OCTA looked at certain segments of its customer base to see if it could find more creative ways to provide some of those trips.

Following the growth management study, which found that one-third of its customers were using ACCESS services to go to and from adult day health care programs, OCTA then launched another study the following year that included assembling a group of adult day health care facility directors.

“Often times these individuals are suffering from Alzheimer’s, dementia or other profound disabilities that may require a service beyond what ACCESS is intended to provide, but they were using it because it was what was available to them, and certainly, the least expensive of their options for their population,” says Wiemiller.

Realizing it would be cheaper for everybody involved for the adult day health care centers to provide their own specialized transportation services and provide an operating subsidy, OCTA began partnering with the groups in Fiscal Year (FY) 2006. It currently has cooperative agreements with nine adult day health care facilities.

Another strategy that came from OCTA’s growth management effort was to take a look at alternatives for ACCESS customers. From that, the same-day taxi program was born, which offers ACCESS-eligible customers an opportunity to take a subsidized taxi trip at any time they wish with no reservations required — typically ACCESS services requires 24-hour notice and has a 30-minute pickup window.

Through the program, customers paid a low flat rate, which was recently raised to $3.60, plus the cost of the trip if it exceeded three miles with OCTA subsidizing the taxi companies for the rest on a sliding scale.

Following a comprehensive transit system study in 2010-2011, which saw opportunity for further financial savings by moving more trips off ACCESS, the same-day taxi program was recently expanded, with OCTA currently running a pilot project that extends its subsidy to cover trips to five miles instead of three miles.

“When we did an informal survey of our current same-day taxi customers, we found that about 75 percent of their trips would have been taken on ACCESS, if they wouldn’t have taken them by taxi,” explains Wiemiller. “Also, when examining the data and comparing their same-day taxi and ACCESS bookings, we could see, clearly, that when their trip exceeded three miles, they would simply bounce over to ACCESS for their trips.”

Wiemiller explains OCTA has seen a significant increase in same-day taxi trips since the pilot project began and plans on surveying customers to see if they are using the service for longer trips they would have typically taken on ACCESS.

“If we see the kind of results we hope to see, it will no longer be a pilot project but become part of our program from here on out,” she says.
Since its inception in FY2006, OCTA’s partnership with adult day health care facilities has provided more than 800,000 trips and saved the agency $14.5 million.

Meanwhile, the same-day taxi program provided 32,600 trips in FY2012, saving OCTA $1.2 million last year alone. From FY2006 to FY2012, OCTA’s same-day taxi program has provided 128,000 trips and saved the agency $3.5 million, according to Wiemiller.

In addition to that financial savings, Wiemiller adds that OCTA has also maintained a high level of customer service.

“As agencies are planning these programs, it is important to still maintain high customer satisfaction and keep the end-user in mind,” she says. “Eighty-eight percent of our customers are satisfied with our ACCESS services, with the majority highly satisfied. So even with the new plans we have put into place, we have still been able to maintain a high satisfaction to our customers, and in some instances, offer services that are actually much improved because they better suit their needs.”[PAGEBREAK]

TriMet
Portland, Ore.
Recognizing a need to provide transportation services to the elderly and disabled even before passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, TriMet partnered with the private nonprofit group Ride Connection more than 25 years ago.

“You have to have the same shared mission and values,” says Olivia Clark, executive director, public affairs, at TriMet about the partnership. “For all of us, it started with finding ways to provide additional transit services to older adults and people with disabilities. Something that was more adaptable and more accessible than just traditional public transportation.”

Ride Connection works in coordination with more than 30 community partners to provide customer-focused, safe and reliable transportation options for individuals who require paratransit-type service in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties.

“Our LIFT [paratransit service] costs were growing in the low double digits, but as we implemented new programs in partnership with Ride Connection, cost growth became flat, beginning about four or five years ago,” says Claire Potter, director, budget, financial analysis and grants, for TriMet. “Our partnership has been hugely successful for TriMet, because of the low cost, no cost programs. Ride Connection is able to be a more effective provider for elderly and people with disabilities in many ways as they are in tune with the community and its needs.”

Ride Connection provides a plethora of services to its customer base, 80% of which is ADA-service eligible, including travel training, door-to-door service, community shuttles, shared vehicle programs, and mileage reimbursement for a friends-and-family-type volunteer program.

“We have contracts with 30-plus organizations, and depending on how and where they are serving and what the need is, it could be an operational contract, a vehicle contract or a shared vehicle agreement for smaller organization that may not need to have a full-time accessible vehicle,” says Julie Wilcke, chief operating officer for Ride Connection. “Really, the approach that we take in Portland is TriMet does a very good job of moving the masses, and we can look at individual needs and be flexible and nimble as needs change and create programs that support independent mobility in our community.”

The specialization of services results in several benefits for the customer.
“What Ride Connection is able to do through their transportation services is group more rides,” Potter explains. “They are able to provide service like shopper shuttles, where customers can interact with each other, so it allows riders to socialize too.”

A portion of funding for Ride Connection’s transportation programs comes through TriMet via federal and state funds. Volunteers who serve in various capacities including as drivers, group transit trip leaders, board members and advocates, make up the bulk of Ride Connection’s workforce. In FY2012, those volunteers contributed 61,592 hours of service.

Aside from its partnership with TriMet, Ride Connection also maintains close partnerships with its community transportation network by supporting them in various ways, including centralized call center services and scheduling; driver training; contract compliance, risk management and safety assistance; accessible fleet acquisitions; fleet management and maintenance; and grant writing.

“We have also recently recognized the importance of technologies and the efficiencies gained through them,” adds Wilcke. “So, we have made a concerted effort to provide Web-based data management and reporting tools to our partners to help them meet more of the demand in an efficient manner.”

In 1986, its first year in operation, Ride Connection provided 11,700 rides. In FY 2012, the private nonprofit provided 410,000 rides and now boasts a network of 642 drivers, 429 of which are volunteers. It has also provided travel training to more than 2,000 individuals who can now access TriMet’s regular fixed-route service.

Currently, Ride Connection saves TriMet $8 million a year, the equivalent of 8% of bus service, which has been crucial for the transit agency since it had to cut 14% of its regular fixed-route services during the most current recession.

“Due to back-to-back recessions and unsustainable health care benefits, we have been struggling to keep service on the street,” explains Potter. “By expanding our partnership with Ride Connection, which has allowed us to save more money, institute fare increases on Lift and provide travel training, we have not had to make more cuts to our regular fixed-route services.”

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