Only seven to 10 percent of any age group with disabilities used paratransit or other specialized services for travel, according to a 2002 study by the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS). The same study said that 8 to 31 percent of any age group with disabilities uses public transit.
Those numbers haven’t likely changed much over the years. Simply put, if paratransit were easier to use and more like on-demand services, more people with disabilities would likely use it rather than often defaulting to public transportation.
Fortunately, innovative new programs are striving to make paratransit both affordable and effective.
The big kids on the block, Uber and Lyft, are partnering with transit systems in the U.S. to provide on-demand paratransit services that are easier, cheaper, and faster for people with disabilities than traditional paratransit services.
These partnerships could make paratransit a more viable transportation option for those who need it most. They also address mobility equity as a form of transportation demand management (TDM) because it provides a large segment of the population – 20 percent of U.S. citizens qualify as disabled – with more efficient and potentially sustainable transportation options.
Why is paratransit’s image unimpressive?
Due largely to its unreliability, people often don’t use paratransit, which U.S. law, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, requires transit agencies to provide.
Perhaps this is why, among those in the BTS survey who had not used paratransit, the overwhelming majority said they either didn’t need or want the services. Indeed, respondents to the BTS study were almost twice as likely to use a normal taxi for full fare rather than paratransit.
So maybe the missing aspect truly is on-demand service. Vehicles need to be physically accessible, of course, but they also need to be practical. People understandably won’t want to use a transportation service that requires them to call at least a day in advance to book a ride.
People also need an affordable service. Currently, if a typical Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) bus trip in the Boston region is $2, the corresponding paratransit trip may equate to about $4.
Such prices are a particular hardship for the low-income group they’re meant to serve. According to a National Academies report titled The Future of Disability in America: “The 2004 National Organization on Disability-Harris Interactive poll (PDF) found that almost two-thirds of all the people with disabilities who reported major transportation problems had annual incomes below $35,000.”
The problem is real: in 2012, when the MBTA raised paratransit costs, protests ensued and “several people chained their wheelchairs together and blocked traffic.”
In the Uber and Lyft partnership with the MBTA; however, the passenger pays $2 per ride, with the MBTA covering $13 after, and the passenger paying anything above $15. Previously, the MBTA paid $31 per ride for paratransit before the partnership, and now it pays $13.
Paratransit today is prohibitively expensive elsewhere. In New York City, paratransit costs $57 per ride. In Washington D.C., it’s $50. And the Government Accountability Office reports that the U.S. average is $29.30. The U.S. average for bus or train trips is $8.15.
How on-demand paratransit could work
In response to the combination of high costs and delays, the MBTA partnered with Uber and Lyft in late 2016 to run a pilot program of on-demand paratransit to appease pleas for same-day, flexible, affordable on-demand paratransit services.
If cities can make partnerships similar to the pilot in Boston, transit agencies can save large sums by making paratransit costs much more in line with transit costs. WMATA in Washington D.C., for one, is in the middle of considering partnering with Uber and Lyft to provide the same type of on-demand paratransit.
Currently, both Uber and Lyft have options for people with disabilities. Uber has UberACCESS, composed of UberWAV and UberASSIST, connecting riders with wheelchair-accessible vehicles and drivers trained to help seniors and people with disabilities, respectively. Lyft has an option for users to alter their settings to request an accessible vehicle.
Another area of optimism is that many other companies are starting to use on-demand services for paratransit. TripSpark in Canada is integrating ridesharing and carpooling with paratransit, while Lift Hero in San Francisco is providing rides for seniors from medical professionals. Furthermore, Florida’s Broward County is considering taxis, Ubers, and Lyfts for paratransit.
What might go wrong?
Nevertheless, there are many critiques of an Uber- or Lyft-facilitated paratransit system.
Lower-income individuals might not be able to afford a smartphone. For those without smartphones, Lyft says it will provide access to its services via telephone, and Uber will provide smartphones to some customers. The question then arises: which Uber customers will qualify as “some” customers? With Lyft, will the quality of service be maintained with telephone access? Customers of both Uber and Lyft pay through the app, so how will that translate either to those who don’t have a smartphone or, even more difficult, those who only use cash?
To scale up such innovations, a fleet of wheelchair-accessible vehicles and trained drivers are needed. Both are in limited supply at the moment. But maybe this is resolvable, since around 80 percent of MBTA paratransit riders don’t need accessible vehicles and the numbers are likely similar in other systems. However, this also may lead to the unintentional segregation of individuals with disabilities who can walk and those who wheel.
Still, it will be necessary to train more drivers to handle paratransit passengers. The current state of untrained drivers creates concern about passenger safety and customer interaction.
Wilson, the Pittsburgh wheelchair user, says, “People are oftentimes incredibly rude and ignorant .” Wilson further recalls an instance when “an Uber driver asked my roommate if I was capable of speaking, while I was talking to him.”
A Next City article that lays out many of these critiques also questioned the availability of timely accessible vehicles. If there is only a limited supply, will they be timely? Only once an hour or two? Would Uber and Lyft pay for retrofits for more cars to be accessible?
Also, making these services affordable remains a huge obstacle. For UberWAV in San Francisco, each ride costs $25 minimum – a price laughably comparable to Uber’s limo service – and does not accept a city-subsidized debit card.
What’s next?
So how do transit agencies get companies like Uber and Lyft to help, if paratransit is inherently not profitable?
As Boston’s pilot continues and WMATA continues discussions with Uber and Lyft, more research and data will surface. TDM has not so far been part of the equation. To further progress, TDM agencies and transportation management associations could hop in to help out their partnering transit agencies with outreach, marketing, education efforts, and much more.
Noting what works and what doesn’t in this early stage of experimentation, the principles of TDM will no doubt be key to improving paratransit and ushering it into the era of an on-demand sharing economy.
Photo by nevermindtheend/Flickr.