3. Summary and Conclusions

3.1 Summary

Mobility issues are particularly challenging in rural areas. Service areas tend to be much larger than their urban and suburban counterparts. Low residential densities, lack of fixed route transit including commuter rail, and limited medical, employment, therapeutic and other critical destinations result in lengthy average ride lengths/ride times, and lower opportunities to share or group riders with similar origins, destinations, and travel times.

In addition, any federal or state funding formula using a per capita basis puts rural areas at a financial disadvantage. Overall, transportation dollars spent at the national level on rural areas is a fraction of total transportation funding.

Most communities receive small amounts of private charitable funds and federal, state, and local public funds to provide transportation for needy individuals including the elderly and disabled. Funding may be obtained through annual proposals written by non-profit organizations for specific needs (e.g. Options for Independence provides transportation for the physically disabled). Typically, most of the money is restricted for the purchase of vans and buses and little is available for operations. Consequently there has been a proliferation of small organizations, each with inadequate operating funds, and each owning a few vehicles that can be used only for their own designated purpose.

In many of these communities, pooling vehicles and combining administrative operations could provide significantly better service for everyone. However there are a variety of obstacles that must be overcome in order for a community to form a centrally coordinated operation. Five of the major concerns relate to effective trip reservations, scheduling, dispatching, record keeping and reporting.

When most agencies started up they used a manual system for reserving and scheduling trips. In a typical operation, trip reservations had to be made at least 24 hours in advance and each trip was hand written onto a color-coded sheet of paper (e.g. yellow for single trip, blue for subscription (recurring) trip, pink for subscription trip with variations, etc.). These sheets of paper were called trip tickets. All of the trip tickets for a given day were assembled on the day before. They were then sorted into piles, where each pile would become the list of trips for a particular van or bus. The basic data from each trip ticket (client name, pickup address and time, drop off address and time, special needs, etc.) were recorded in one or two lines onto a separate sheet of paper which then became the schedule for the day's trips for a particular driver and vehicle (the driver manifest). During the day, the driver would record the status of each trip onto his/her driver manifest and return it at the end of the day to the accounting person. The accounting person would assemble all of the trip tickets and driver manifests for the accounting period (usually a month) and extract, aggregate and summarize the data for the necessary reports and invoices.

However, as agencies grew and reporting requirements became more complex, the administrative workload began to require a disproportionate share of the agencies time and resources. At some point during the growth process most agencies looked for computer technology to help with the scheduling and reporting functions. Several commercial packages were available to choose from ranging is price from $5,000 to more than $75,000. The features varied with the price of the software from basic spreadsheet type applications to sophisticated geographical information systems (GIS) with automatic trip scheduling. Agency personnel, who were not skilled in computer use, were faced with the necessity to evaluate the trade-offs between cost and features.

The competition among software vendors is quite intense, and the permutations of purported features and prices are mind-boggling. The purpose of this report is not to compare the claims of various software vendors, but to survey the users of one low-cost product in an attempt to shed light on the software features that are most useful for small- to medium-sized communities and the strategies used by various agencies to implement these features.

Nine small- to medium-sized paratransit agencies that are using the same low-cost software product were surveyed, and the detailed results are included in Appendix A. A review of the data and interviews with the agencies indicates that the following features have been found to be most important for small- to medium-sized agencies:

3.1.1 Reservationist

• A client database containing default information for each client (name, phone number, principal funder, typical provider, emergency contact, service expiration date, etc.).
• A trip ticket request form with pre-assigned data from the client database, and convenient features for creating return trips and subscriptions.
• Convenient features for editing clients, trip tickets and subscriptions.
• Convenient features for viewing future trips reservations for a client.

3.1.2 Scheduler

• A display of a day's trip tickets that can be sorted by pickup time, drop off time, and client name.
• Color-coded trip tickets indicating geographical zones for the pickup and drop off addresses.
• A visual indicator on each ticket signifying the condition of the client (e.g. ambulatory, wheel chair, walker/cane, motorized cart, etc.).
• Convenient features for grouping trip tickets by time and geographical zone.
• Convenient features for scheduling volunteers using privately owned vehicles (POVs).
• Point-and-click features and/or drag-and-drop features for assigning trip tickets to vehicles.
• A convenient display for viewing unscheduled trips prior to assignment to vehicles.
• Automatic printing of driver manifests.

3.1.3 Dispatcher

• A convenient display of all trip tickets for the current day.
• Convenient features for inserting new trips into the current day schedule.
• Immediate access to each trip for viewing and editing.
• Convenient features for reassigning trips among vehicles.
• Convenient features for updating the status of each trip as:
  1. as yet unassigned to a vehicle (e.g. a call-back ticket),
  2. scheduled for pickup,
  3. client on board the vehicle,
  4. client delivered at destination,
  5. trip cancelled by client,
  6. client did not show up (no-show).

3.1.4 Administrator

• Convenient features for archiving old trip tickets and backing up the database.
• Sufficient data on each trip for producing reports including: client name, age group, gender, ethnicity, funder, provider, trip purpose, revenue and non-revenue mileages, condition client (e.g. ambulatory, wheel chair, walker/cane, motorized cart, etc.), subscription vs. non-subscription trips.
• Convenient features for maintaining the database tables (e.g. list of funders, list of providers, outdated subscriptions, etc.).
• Convenient features for editing past trips.

3.2 Conclusions

The size of agencies surveyed ranged from about 700 to 17,000 trips per month, and may be classified as small to medium. All of the agencies in this range benefited from low-cost computer software for the purposes of making trip reservations, scheduling trips, dispatching trips, record keeping, and reporting. Low-cost software included in this survey ranges from about $5,000 to $15,000 depending on the number of work stations, complexity of customizing the database to the community, and amount of training.

The principal data items that were considered necessary for each trip were client name and physical/cognitive condition, age group, funder, provider, and trip purpose. For volunteers driving their own vehicles, revenue and non-revenue mileages were necessary.

The principal feature that were considered important for the computer interface included: fast access to client and trip information, ease of creating trip tickets and subscriptions, color-coded visual display of trip tickets, drag-and-drop and point-point-and-click functionality, and convenient features for generating end-of-month report statistics.

Features that were considered not to be of high priority for small- to medium-sized agencies included geographical information systems (GIS), global positioning systems (GPS), automatic trip routing, and automatic trip scheduling. The cost and added complexity of these features were not considered necessary and could not be justified within the agency budgets. Agencies at the higher end of the range (e.g. over 15,000 trips per month), and with a significant number of buses, may benefit from automatic trip scheduling.

Agencies with a few as five buses were considering the use of mobile data terminals (MDTs) for communications between the dispatcher and vehicle drivers. Also, there was serious consideration for the implementation of swipe cards for automatic verification and data recording. However, at this time these advanced technologies are probably practical only for the agencies approaching medium size and larger.

Endnotes

1. Easy Rides produced by Mobilitat, Inc., 1605 Green River Way, Green River, WY 82935. (888)806-6595