Sometimes getting the best vantagepoint from which to view things is largely a matter of luck. This was the case with me, as I got to direct the U.S. Department of Transportation’s first nationwide study of demand-responsive transportation systems for the Elderly and Disabled individuals (referred to as Handicapped in those days). Within less than two years after that study was completed, I was awarded a contract to design and operate a 70-vehcle paratransit system, in two non-contiguous service areas, in Los Angeles County. Before the robots jumped in (early in the 1990s), one actually had to know what he or she was doing to design an efficient paratransit system, and to operate one that was reliable (mostly defined by on-time performance), efficient and, most importantly, safe.
When I examined 30 paratransit systems in 18 cities for USDOT (two volumes of my study were published by USDOT in 1981), I found only two that delivered about three trips per vehicle service hour, 27 that delivered a trip and a half or less, and one that delivered nearly 11. In other words, while there were certain differences in the densities of these various serv ice areas, the intelligently-design system delivered about nine times more passenger trips per hour than the ignorantly-undesigned majority (basically nine out of 10). The efficient one – in moderately-populated Tulsa, Oklahoma – was basically about nine times more efficient than the system in densely-populated Boston. Further, the Tulsa system’s efficiency was handicapped (no pun intended) by the fact that the native Americans preferred to travel in a separate system operated by fellow-native Americans. I can only guess what the efficiency of this system would have been had these two sub-systems been consolidated. A sloppy guess is about 10 to 15 percent more efficient, and not much more, because these two sub-populations tended to live in certain parts of the service area, in which most of their trip needs could be satisfied.
Fast-forwarding about 46 or 47 years, as a marginally involved member of APTA’s ADA-oriented Access Committee, I was surprised to learn that a Zoom-type conference was being held because, reflecting some sort of desperation, the Committee had “learned” (I used this word loosely) that the efficiency of their collective paratransit systems had improved by only a single percent this past year. Never mind that I bumped into a system roughly 900 percent more efficient than most of Todays’ systems almost half a Century ago.
The hostility toward excellence that pervades our Deep State paratransit systems is far more severe than in any other sector of public transportation – including even a sector that is outright corrupt (and I have the redacted data to prove it). In one of the few earlier meetings of the Access Committee I attended nearly 20 years ago, there were three subcommittees – one chaired by a colleague (Doug Cross) who actually understood paratransit and knew what he was doing. To muzzle him, the Committee dissolved his subcommittee. I also remember another knowledgeable colleague, Richad DeRock, standing up after listening to a litany of drivel by a few of the Committee’s mediocre members about why their systems were so inefficient, and declaring, “You know, my system [in rural Washington State] gets 3.4 trips per hour, and we pay our drivers $28 an hour.”
Placing these comments in context, in most paratransit systems I examine today as an expert witness, the drivers are earning little more than minimum wage, while the attendants (sometimes referred to as aides or “bus monitors”) often earned only the minimum wage. In one system I examined, the attendants received the same training as the school’s janitors and cafeteria workers.
Needless to say, the two individuals I noted above, and myself, are not exactly well-liked by the vast majority of know-nothings. If one can feel a “hiss” upon entering a room, I can say that I feel this every time I enter a room where this Committee is being held. Fortunately, I do not plan on doing so ever again – although it could happen: At the first meeting I attended, where almost no one but the flagrantly-ignorant and patently-crooked chairperson knew who I was, the Committee spent almost the entire session discussing how to help the defendant in a class action lawsuit in which I was the expert witness for the plaintiffs. (It is a special thrill to find oneself absorbing information like a spy when one had no remote intention of being one.) Providing a context for this lawsuit for poor on-time performance (a phenomenon that saves a transit agency lots of money because service is so poor that a sizeable percentage of former passengers have stopped using it), the software developer had visited the system and added 30 percent more time to every vehicle’s schedule – an approach that compares to stirring a cup of tea with a shovel, since every route did not need 30 percent more time, while others likely needed far more. Otherwise, one could only imagine how impossible it was for vehicles to operate on time with 30 percent less time than was likely needed to do so (not realistic, of course, as the 30 percent increase in time was so rounded off that is could only have been pulled out of the air).
One can say I am not a fan of robots designing transportation systems. Of course, robots do not design anything in transportation – although it looks like that, like their design of virtually everything, is changing. What robots do for paratransit systems is to optimize the efficiency of the chaos that resulted from the inability of any live humans to design the system in the first place. Knowledge passes slowly in the Deep State. After the USDOT published two volumes of my study 45 years ago, it disseminated none of them to anyone. I then got a chance to make a presentation of my study at an annual APTA Bus and Paratransit Conference. I don’t believe my presentation, or report, was included in the Conference’s Proceedings. One could easily find a somewhat refined version of it online, since its readily accessible (including a search feature) on my website (see https://transalt.com/principles-paratransit-system-design/) which has superb SEO. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine a more basic title that would require less effort to find online that this one.
When attorneys contact me about helping them in a case involving paratransit, special needs schoolbus service or non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) service – almost always on the plaintiff’s side – they often whine about how difficult it is to find an expert on this subject (a sensibility that makes me hostile almost immediately, as its suggests I was only called because they could not find anyone else). Regardless, I usually give attorneys a chance. And occasionally, I really like them. (Many are actually people – an acknowledgement that many expert witnesses in fields across-the-board would not easily agree with.) But I explain to them that their difficulty is because almost no one under age 65 can conceivably be an expert since those who entered the field after the early 1990s only learned to operate the robots. They can’t possibly know how to actually design a system –which must be done manually (even if one then allows the robots to optimize the system once designed).
I don’t mean to make this as absolute as it sounds. There must be some younger individuals who can do this – just like the mastermind of the Tulsa, OK system was able to do more than 50 years ago, mostly by thinking clearly about the passengers’ needs, not their whims (which ADA-required paratransit affords them, escalating costs greatly in the process. But we are now exploring the edge of this universe. The predominant mass of individuals within this universe is apparently paralyzed because, however in the world it was measured, a major voice on the Access Committee was startled or surprised to learn that efficiency improved by only a single percentage point, among those systems that even measured their efficiency and reported it, compared to some similar finding a year earlier (likely measured a bit differently by at least a few of those systems reporting their system’s efficiency.
Reducing this finding to the kindergarten level, during the first couple of years directing the operations of my own paratransit system for a decade, I soon found that a really good driver could provide service about 30 percent more efficiently than could a really terrible driver. So I realized that I needed to increase drivers’ salaries – and wanted to increase our starting salary by 50 percent. So I made a proposal to our social service agency that I guaranteed: If they increased our rate by enough for us to increase drivers’ salaries by the 50 percent I wanted – which would mean a higher rate (not a higher cost), I would guarantee that the costs would be equal to the current costs or less. And I would guarantee it. It took the masterminds of this agency 10 months to agree to amend out contract, after which we quickly increased our efficiency considerably (not by 50 percent, since there were many other factors involved that would not be affected by drivers’ salaries – like, for example, the cost of our vehicles or their fuel). But as I suspected, our total costs to that agency were, as a result, indeed less.
Needless to say, I could not wait to get out of paratransit operations, and during my transition out (when I was living part-time in Paris and involved in a bus design project with two Slovenian companies), scheduling software emerged, and we were given notice that our contract would not be renewed. Needless to say, I was hated and loathed by the top officials in the agency for which I was engaged, mostly since I absolutely refused to listen to or talk about anything with these knuckleheads unless it actually related to operations.
Years earlier I had stopped begging them to actually monitor anything we were doing – things like reviewing over 100 drivers’ logs every day, and our 99 percent on-time performance (based upon those things that we could control). We never had a single wheelchair tipover (I served as an expert witness on at least 150 incidents involving that scenario). We never had anyone injured getting on or off a vehicle – while I have served as an expert witness on more than 200 such cases – cases where a decently-trained seeing eye dog would know the boarding or alighting would not turn our well. But never a word of praise. Word among other bureaucrats related to our agency was that we really knew what we were doing – but we were “hard to work with.” Insisting on doing things intelligently, I suppose we were.
That paratransit service is a sector of the public transportation industry’s Deep State should be obvious by now. The frustration is that there seems to be no remote interest in doing anything differently. It is also not reassuring to recognize that this is as true at the top of the industry hierarchy as it is at the bottom. At the moment, I do not even know who the director of USDOT is. Nor am I interested. Nor should it matter. During the previous Administration, while I have great respect for Pete Buttigieg’s intellect, and think he would have been a superb ambassador to Russia, for example, I felt he could not tell the difference between a rear axle and the neck of a giraffe. When he was consolidated out of a flight because our airline industry failed to place him on the “Do not f— with” list, he outlawed non-refundable flights. Great. The notion of asking a sector of transportation to maintain spare vehicles – like the worst transit system in the country does – never appears to have entered his mind. Nor did anything else meaningful that I learned about – admittedly a small subset of his decisions given the vast array of administrations within the Department.
So the deep-fried paratransit industry rolls merrily along. As the passengers say, “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” And as the injured victims’ lawyers say, “Just give me a third of the cut. I’m only going to do easy, cheap stuff to earn whatever my minimalist effort yields.”
To most public transportation professionals, compared to fixed route service (transit, schoolbus, motorcoach), paratransit service (and other “demand-responsive” services) is a Rubiks cube. Current day efficiency is far lower than the best systems operating 50 years ago.
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