Next to boarding and alighting incidents – incidents that a seeing eye dog knows will not turn out well, seconds before it happens – wheelchair tipovers are, by far, the most common incident theme. They comprise more than a fifth of the more than 700 lawsuits I’ve served on as an expert.
I will almost certainly die before I can write about all the reasons that so many wheelchairs tip over. This segment is only one of them.
The problem often begins with transit agencies unwilling to accept the responsibility for transporting disabled passengers – particularly on paratransit service. For a reason I’ll never completely understand, but which is partly USDOT’s fault for not disseminating a three-volume manual I wrote in 1980 that explained precisely how to design such a system to be efficient (USDOT published two volumes of it yet disseminated none). Instead, they hire contractors to provide this service – usually contractors who have no remote idea about how to provide this form of transportation, and no need to since their ability to do this properly is almost never evaluated intelligibly.
Other than perhaps under our current Administration, a public agency cannot simply hire whichever company it wants, like maybe one owned by the cousin of the General Manager. There must be some semblance of a process for this selection. More typical 50 years ago, but still prevalent today, transit agencies hired the lowest bidder. That’s right. That’s why the landscape is dominated by a handful of oligarchies. A document knows as a Request for Proposals (RFP) is issued. And sometimes a “pre-bid meeting” is held to answer questions about it (a meeting that often comes close to a brawl with the transit agency refuses to provide information that would make the bidding fair – like what the incumbent contractor is being paid, and by what mechanism (per hour? Per trip? Per mile? Some combination?). As an expert witness in this field, and even before that, as a consultant, I have reviewed scores of RFPs. Some practically beg for corruption – like the assignment of 20 or 25 points to a floating concept called “Experience of the Firm,” which no bidder can be held accountable for. I have occasionally come across proposals hundreds of pages long, filled with complete nonsense. I remember one proposal from one of public transportation’s oligopolies with roughy100 pages of one-page biographies of individuals who were dedicated to work for a day or two on the project. I recognized a few who have passed away. Most of them were simply people who never worked for the company drafting this proposal. How could a transit agency’s “evaluation panel” possibly tell? Otherwise, the concept is so stupid it is hard for someone writing about it to contain himself: Do the members of the “Project Team” wire their brains together at night to share their experiences such that “the firm” by itself has any? How stupid is stupid? Well, here is the answer: This form of stupid yields great benefits to the handful of oligopolies who, over the years, have crafted only one “master” proposal. For every system they bid on, throughout the country, they submit the same proposal – but only after tweaking it for the RFP it is modified to respond to.
Then there is cost. Some part of every RFP awards points for cost. So those companies willing to pay their drivers close to minimum wage, and willing to provide only a skeleton of management personnel who could never find the time to properly monitor service, even if they wanted to, or even if they knew how. Of the RFPs I had crafted during my time as a consultant (which overlapped my expert witness services during the first 15 years I began serving as one), I arranged the RFP to award more points to those bidders paying their drivers more money. Typically, I awarded a whole point more for every dollar above the bottom of my scale – given companies with higher-paid drivers a serious advantage. I also allowed only a handful of points for “Experience of the Firm,” keeping this factor in check. Instead, I cared about those individuals who were going to be working on-site – particularly the qualifications of the scheduler (qualifications a company that did not understand how to provide shared-ride demand responsive transportation could not possibly explain). As a consequence, some serious, knowledgeable “family-owned” companies that genuinely cared about things like safety, but who also understood at least some rudiments of efficiency, won these bids.
But I am describing a rarity. Most paratransit drivers, and especially most NEMT drivers, earn a pittance more than the minimum wage. Bus monitors (or attendants or aides, as they are sometimes called) actually do earn the minimum wage. The reader should keep in mind that some demand-responsive services – like “special needs” transportation for disabled school-age children – only operate for four or five hours a day. So effectively, most of the bus monitors of these companies, and many of their drivers, are collecting welfare. Why should these individuals care about securing some stinking wheelchair? Why should they secure its occupant into the chair? If a wheelchair tips over, and the occupant dies a painful death, one or both of these individuals is usually scapegoated – so that he or she can walk into a better-paying job at a fast-food restaurant?
This is just another reason why public transportation is a legitimate member, on the bottom rung, of the “Deep State.” From top to bottom – from the nincompoop who created the RFP (when one can usually steal one from a transit agency that actually knows what its doing) to the lowly bus monitor, this pyramid of ignorance, incompetence and reckless disregard is often an underlying cause of many wheelchair tipovers, or passengers simply flying out of their chairs.
A seasoned expert in any mode of public transportation – much less one who is thoroughly familiar with all of them – will be able to pick the lead agency apart. And he or she can usually smell a phony proposal full of false premises before even opening the envelope. This is actually easier than it seems, since genuine experts know which firms the bottom feeders are, and can identify them on the return address of the envelope. One can also make a good guess because the worse the bidder, the thicker and heavier its proposal is likely to be.
Few public transportation agencies know how to craft a Request for Proposal that will yield the best bidder – just like few of these agencies know how to evaluate bids. That so many wheelchairs tip over is a consequence of this failure – among countless other reasons.
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