This is known as "paratransit" and it's fairly common, e.g. there's THE RIDE in Boston metro, Wheel-Trans in Toronto, TransHelp in Peel region in the GTA, HandyDART in Metro Vancouver...
I believe in the US it's a requirement of the ADA for public transit agencies to offer such services. I would imagine here in Canada the legislation is handled provincially, with guidelines for service standards developed by CUTA.
Hell, we even have that on SF buses and trains, and our transit is terrible. I regularly see people on Muni buses in wheelchairs, alone and unassisted.
My local bus system has ramp entries, and the driver can require non-mobility-impaired riders to give up seats at the front. (And those seats can also be folded up to make room for wheelchairs.)
Would something like that work for the New York subways? Or would it require too much oversight to make people follow the rules?
I think that deserves consideration, along with the related category of access-impaired riders. In a major city it might easily be cheaper to pay for years of door to door service than make an ADA retrofit for a subway station in an old building.
Of course. But it's easy for many to unthinkingly look at public transit through the lens of efficiency for able-bodied riders and ignore those who are long-term or temporarily disabled in some manner.
I don't know how common this is, but Calgary offers free trips for people who can't use the main services due to disability. You need to book the day before, register your eligibility and other limitations. It seems like a good way of covering gaps in accessibility like old buses, areas that are a long walk from stations with sidewalks that are in poor condition, etc. But it can never move as many people as buses.
Dealing with disabilities is definitely an issue for the bus system. Does society need a public financed transportation system for disabled people. I would say absolutely.
However, I don't think that should be the general bus system. Loading/unloading a wheelchair can take several minutes each way throwing the bus off schedule. Furthermore, to accomodate the disabled you need more stops. So you have stops ridiculously close together (like 40 meters in some cases). This further slows down the buses a lot.
I think we need some sort of parallel taxi/bus service for the disabled and to focus on making the main bus service fast and on time. How to fund this though or make it work. I don't know.
The bigger issue is that city planners building public transit systems don't have the same interests as commuters. Inevitably they want to use public transit as an instrument for various social policies.
Commuters just want to get to work reliably and they'd like a seat. And they'd like to have a minimum of screening so that they don't have to deal with people with severe mental issues on the way to work.
In Toronto they've gone as far as launching a crowdfunded bus route, which the city had an icy response too. It had to shut down because of legal uncertainties.
So I think the big problem with transit is that people in city gov refuse to recognise that commuters desires are perfectly reasonable. If the city won't provide them options then they should at least make sure there aren't legal issues with private providers.
This has been done, I’ve lived in cities where this was the case for a while. In at least some cities, this turned public transit into a mobile homeless shelter, drug den, etc. So normal people stopped using public transit because it was unsafe and unpleasant.
Literally, a car that waits for your call, comes right to your door, and chauffeurs you around, is as economically efficient as our bus system. This is crazy!
I recall that when San Francisco retrofitted its city buses so that all are accessible to people using wheelchairs, an economic analysis showed it would be cheaper for the city taxpayers simply to provide free taxi service to all wheelchair users. The reason for putting people who use wheelchairs on city buses seems to have been wholly political--to mainstream such persons into a form of transportation that makes them more visible to other members of the public (at least, the members of the public who use buses).
I have both an emotional reaction and a rational reaction to this policy trade-off. On the one hand, my own late father was confined to a wheelchair as a quadriplegic (after a slip-and-fall accident on an icy parking lot here in Minnesota) for the last six years of his life. So I totally get why friends and relatives of persons who use wheelchairs want public places, and by extension public transportation, to be accessible to persons who use wheelchairs. That allows many more family outings with grandparents and their grandchildren than might otherwise be possible, for example. But my rational reaction is still that we all have to work hard to pay our taxes, so "public" money (money derived from taxation) should still be spent responsibly. If devoting taxi service (and, I hope, someday a self-driving car service) with public subsidies helps needy members of the population more than bus service, so be it. Spend the least money to get the positive externality is generally the way to go in public policy.
People with more serious disabilities can use "Dial-a-Ride", since Transport for London recognize that road transport is more suited to the final 0.0001% of the public.
I would think that tourists are willing to pay for the privilege, people with disabilities can receive a discounted rate based on their metro card which leaves only the workers who live in areas that are not covered well by the subway.
Getting off track what I'd actually like to see is a standardized app/technology driven jitney/minivan system to help people make the last mile connections to and from subway endpoints.
>Public transportation service means the operation of a vehicle that provides general or special service to the public on a regular and continuing basis consistent with 49 U.S.C. Chapter 53.
>(A) means regular, continuing shared-ride surface transportation services that are open to the general public or open to a segment of the general public defined by age, disability, or low income; and
in a legal sense, Waymo doesn't seem to meet even these high level definitions. So it's likely classified as private transportation unless I'm missing something.
To expand on this, since it sounds kind of flippant:
In the US at the moment, public transit suffers from the fact that in most areas, for most people it's largely optional: you can drive, or you can use public transit. Quite a few people choose to drive, leading to a disproportionate fraction of the people on public transit being people who have no other option, and furthermore the fraction of outright deranged individuals (leaving all their clothes on the platform save for a baseball cap and a syringe tucked behind their ear, for an example I witnessed a few days ago) being over-represented in the public transit riding populace.
Overcoming this stigma is important for getting people to use public transit as their primary means of transportation, and working towards making truly car-optional cities.
These are all examples of European mass transit users. We even have places designated fir disabled, injured and elderly people on every bus, tram and metro.
The thing is, there are a few reasons why the able-bodied tend to prefer the experience of a ride-hailing app over public transit.
- it comes to where you are, and drops you off exactly where you're going
- you get a ride when you're ready to go, and not whenever the transit is running
- higher chances of getting rides at weird hours
- no risk of interacting with aggressive panhandlers, people high on drugs, the mentally ill, or people with bad personal hygiene
Public transit has significant advantages, as well: biggest among them, it avoids the tragedy of the commons, particularly road congestion and carbon emissions. It has salubrious effects on urban planning. Places with good public transit are nice places to live.
What I want to point out is that, every one of the advantages for the able-bodied are significantly exaggerated for wheelchair users.
I don't think it's possible to offer a comparable experience, due to the very nature of the disability. So if it's more expensive to offer the less desirable option, well, we shouldn't do that.
More expensive public transit means picking from the following buckets: less transit, more expensive tickets, less pay for workers, starving other municipal programs, or kicking the problem down the road with municipal debt. None of those are great; they can be worth it for a better experience (replacing old worn-down cars for example), but not for a worse one.
"Vast majority" may have been too strong, but I stand behind "majority". The two programs on that Wiki page that actually have links are for disabled passengers only. Looking at the three systems that have covered areas I have lived, Broward County Transit and New Jersey Transit offer DRT only to those with disabilities, and Dallas Area Rapid Transit has very limited DRT service for non-disabled customers.
> The one here is open to anyone and even sometimes runs a loop for a local taproom.
If it is running a loop it isn't DRT, it's a jitney.
I believe in the US it's a requirement of the ADA for public transit agencies to offer such services. I would imagine here in Canada the legislation is handled provincially, with guidelines for service standards developed by CUTA.
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