Improvements Needed for "Paratransit"

Paratransit: Stuck in the Slow Lane

By PAULA SPAN

I have always found it reassuring to see New Jersey Transit’s striped Access Link vans motoring around my suburban town and to spot New York City’s Access-a-Ride vehicles criss-crossing Manhattan. Elderly and disabled people I know have used them, and while they have sometimes grumbled about having to wait too long for pick-ups, the vans have taken them where they needed to go.

More than 20 years have passed since the Americans With Disabilities Act required public transit operators to provide “paratransit”: door-to-door services for people whose disabilities mean they can’t use conventional buses. If I am no longer a safe driver when I get older, I have told myself, that’s how I’ll get around, too.

A recent conversation with Sandra Rosenbloom disabused me of this rosy picture, though. A longtime transportation scholar and head of the Urban Institute’s Innovation in Infrastructure program, she published an analysis this spring with a discouraging headline: “Roadblocks Ahead for Seniors Who Don’t Drive.”

Dr. Rosenbloom quickly ticked off a number of problems with paratransit. First, the transit operators are interpreting disability requirements so strictly that they bar many older people from using it. “A lot of things that make you not a competent driver aren’t serious enough disabilities to qualify,” she pointed out.

If you are in a wheelchair, you can sign up. But if you shouldn’t drive because your reaction time is too slow or you can’t turn your head enough to see behind you or you have trouble reading road signs, “none of those things qualify you for A.D.A. paratransit.”

Even if you do qualify, the law mandates paratransit only within a 1.5-mile corridor: three-quarters of a mile on either side of an existing bus route. I happen to live and work in communities well served by mass transit, so it is easy to forget how many places aren’t: rural areas, most suburbs, plenty of those 55+ “active senior” communities miles from anywhere.

Somewhere between a third and two-thirds of older Americans don’t live along a paratransit corridor. But even those who do rarely seem to take advantage of the service, judging from the limited ridership data available. “A few people ride a lot, but most people who are eligible don’t ride at all,” Dr. Rosenbloom said. “The services are just not good enough.”

Seniors may dislike the need to make appointments ahead of time, to wait for pick-ups, to have to block out half a day because by regulation, paratransit companies must arrive only within a two-hour window. “There’s no spontaneity,” Dr. Rosenbloom said. Older people also tell her they worry about telling anyone that their houses will be empty for hours.

Ridership has grown, nonetheless, rising 49 percent between 1999 and 2011. But costs have risen far more steeply. Paratransit has become shockingly expensive: an average one-way trip cost more than $34 in 2011, the Urban Institute analysis found; on average, riders paid 10 percent of that.

Strapped transit systems don’t want to foot that bill and have been cutting back, not only by adopting stricter eligibility requirements but by declining to provide service outside the required corridors, as they sometimes used to do. Lawsuits by disability advocates have also made operators less willing to be flexible.

For all these reasons, paratransit doesn’t appear able or willing to keep the growing number of older Americans mobile in the years ahead. Dr. Rosenbloom advocates expanding paratransit to areas where disabled seniors are aging in place, but she also points out that we will also need other kinds of “demand-responsive” services for those not disabled enough to qualify, along with cars made safer for older people — or anybody — to drive.

Otherwise, “by the time a 40-year-old is 70 or 75, there will be nothing out there for them,” Dr. Rosenbloom said. “People have to start working on this now.”