Strategy Guide to Enable and Promote the Use of Fixed-Route Transit by People with Disabilities (2014) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 69-90
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From page 69... ...
69 C h a p t e r 6 Previous chapters of this strategy guide have addressed important prerequisites to achieving the goal of increasing the use of fixed-route transit services by people with disabilities: understanding current use of transit by persons with disabilities; setting system-wide policy and goals; making the fixed-route transit service reliably accessible and usable; and addressing access at bus stops and in the pedestrian infrastructure. This chapter focuses on providing riders with the information they need to use the service.
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70 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities Promoting Accessible Fixed-Route Transit. A starting point for public information and marketing is to make the target population aware that accessible fixed-route transit services exist and may be an option for trips that the individual wants to make.
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Marketing, Public Information, Trip Planning, and Travel Training 71 from fares and schedules to complementary paratransit service. A simple web page describing the benefits and how-to-ride information is sufficient to provide this function, but in itself is unlikely to "close the sale" with the target audience.
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72 Strategy Guide to Enable and Promote the Use of Fixed-Route Transit by People with Disabilities Figure 6-2. Article targeted at seniors in the Intercity Transit service area (reprinted courtesy of The Thurston-Mason Senior News)
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Marketing, Public Information, Trip Planning, and Travel Training 73 TRAX light rail system (see Figure 6-3)
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74 Strategy Guide to Enable and Promote the Use of Fixed-Route Transit by People with Disabilities A similar type of retail approach used by Laketran in Painesville, OH, is to use the public schools to target young people with cognitive disabilities (generally high school-age students with Individualized Education Programs)
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Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 75 Alternatively, the transit system can rely on existing relationships with these organizations and get them to recruit new individuals to receive information and training. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA)
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76 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities • Most of our buses are low-floor (no steps) and easy to board.
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Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 77 this basic information needs to be accompanied by one-to-one or small group contact by a representative who can "sell" the benefits of fixed-route transit and provide a seamless entry into travel training. Although it is not essential for the outreach representative to also provide the travel training, this is the most common approach among the agencies contacted.
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78 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities Survey Results The survey described earlier in this report provided an overview of the availability of trip planners at the 136 transit systems that responded to questions related to this type of service. Of these systems, 80 (59%)
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Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 79 The RTA Trip Planner gets approximately 8,500 web hits per day. The trip planner can also be used to find bicycle, walking, and driving paths to transit routes.
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80 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities If a trip planner can be thought of as providing "wholesale" information simultaneously to a large number of users, then one alternative approach to providing specific current path-oftravel information at this wholesale level is to instead take a "retail" approach in which travel trainers work with individual customers to plan frequently made trips with the path-of-travel information available in a GIS database like RTAMS. Non-accessible Bus Stop Information: Long Beach Transit, Long Beach, CA Long Beach Transit (LBT)
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Figure 6-5. TriMet trip planner result showing walking profile and bus stop characteristics (aerial and street-level photos of the bus stop are also available by clicking on the map)
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82 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities To keep the trip planner up to date, TriMet updates schedule and route changes as they occur and coordinates with the municipal jurisdictions to identify barriers to accessible paths of travel. TriMet recently expanded the trip planner to three adjacent counties in the service area, which took approximately three months and cost $12,000 for all three counties.
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Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 83 Conclusions Trip planners are expensive to develop and to maintain as conditions change. This is particularly so if the objective is to include path-of-travel information that is important to people with disabilities.
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84 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities agency in southwest Connecticut that was described as a successful effort to enable paratransit riders to use fixed-route transit service at six regional transit systems.
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Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 85 King County Metro, Seattle, WA, Case Study To facilitate use of the fixed-route transit system by persons with disabilities, King County (WA) Metro implemented several different travel training programs to address the needs of persons with various disabilities.
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86 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities each of three years for travel training. AWC had provided travel training instruction for many years as part of its job placement service, but this funding enabled LTD to make additional referrals for training.
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Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 87 student on the use of public transportation. About 20% of the respondents did not provide or support travel training.
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88 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities In 2012, Intercity Transit's Travel Training Program trained approximately 96 riders (including 68 Dial-A-Lift riders) and conducted 242 travel training trips, 65 barrier assessments, and multiple group field trips.
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From page 89... ...
Marketing, public Information, trip planning, and travel training 89 2,120 trips transitioned to fixed-route transit per year are needed to recover the $83,324 in travel training costs; this is equivalent to about four daily riders. It is important to note that the estimate of cost savings reflects only those individuals who voluntarily choose to participate in travel training when applying for the Dial-A-Lift program.
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90 Strategy Guide to enable and promote the Use of Fixed-route transit by people with Disabilities rather than ADA paratransit for the trips taken by these riders in the first three months of 2013 was about $11,000. Tracking ADA paratransit ridership and costs also provides an indication of the success of efforts to enable and promote the use of fixed-route transit services.
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