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Hello UCB members,
I am writing to inform you that I am
part of a group of blind paratransit riders who has an upcoming meeting
with
Mr. Jerry Benson, the new UTA president/CEO to discuss concerns and
solutions regarding the UTA’s paratransit service. I am writing to ask
that the UCB as an organization, as well as individual members who ride
paratransit email Mr. Benson with their frustrations regarding their
experiences with Paratransit. Personally, I have been putting up with
Paratransit policies, procedures, and attitudes that needlessly reduce
the convenience, efficiency, comfort, and usability of the paratransit
system for too long and I now intend to do something about it. Some
examples of situations I am referring to include “dead zones and “dead
times” where you cannot get picked up or dropped off at your desired time
and location, elimination of entire routes from paratransit coverage
(such as flex route buses, ski buses, express busses, and the streetcar),
unacceptable scheduling such as being picked up 1 hour before desired
pick up times and being forced to accept ludicrously long trip times, the
UTA’s failure to provide adequate and useful assistance in getting
to/from the bus, and the UTA’s failure to follow a nearly 2-year old Federal
Transit Administration rule requiring a 5-minute call ahead system.
None of these issues or concerns are new to paratransit nationally or
locally; in fact, many other paratransit jurisdictions far exceed the
services provided by the UTA, and often provide services and implement
policies as a course of normal business that UTA supervisors often
declare as “impossible”.
I believe the UTA gets away with
providing such poor customer service, poor transportation service, and
the implementation of anti-passenger policies because:
1. Its passenger
base is a captive audience whose disabilities and financial status leave
them with no other option;
2. The paratransit service is an
unaccountable monopoly receiving most of its money from Washington D.C.
not from local ridership supporting the service, thus the UTA does not
need to respond to its customers;
3. Supervisors implement
anti-passenger policies because there is no process for passengers to
hold them accountable—there is no appeal process and the same people
receiving and evaluating complaints are the same people making the bad
decisions in the first place.
I am tired of filing endless complaints
that go nowhere, and I am tired of being treated like a second-class
citizen who should be grateful for the crumbs being given, rather than
being treated like a customer who should be respected and whose business
must be earned and maintained. If you feel like I feel, please email Mr.
Benson at JBenson@rideuta.com.
Please mention my name in the email body, title the subject
“paratransit concerns”, and CC me.
I have attached my letter to Mr. Benson for your review; if you like, you
can sign onto this letter and forward it to Mr. Benson. The appointment
is for January 10th, please send all emails before then.
Thank You,
Jim Reed
Here is the message sent to the Utah
Transit Agency:
To: Mr. Benson, (Utah Transit Agency)
My name is Jim Reed. I am a blind UTA
paratransit rider. I am writing to request an in-person meeting with you
to discuss what I view as a constant and on-going lack of customer
service and responsiveness within the UTA paratransit department. Before
you ask, yes, I have been in contact with paratransit supervisors many
times over multiple years to resolve these issues with no result.
Whenever anyone ask what I think of the
UTA paratransit service, I must answer “they do as much as possible to
provide as little service as possible.” What I mean by that is, every time
there is a decision (policy, scheduling, special request, legal
interpretation, or otherwise) it always goes to support the business
needs of UTA while completely disregarding the needs of UTA passengers.
It is obvious to me that paratransit passengers are not viewed by the
agency as customers whose business needs to be earned, cultivated, and
maintained in order for the service to continue, but rather we are viewed
and treated as a detested burden or chore worthy of the bare legal
minimum and nothing more. I am tired of being treated like a detested
chore and a second-class citizen.
Further, the actions of paratransit supervisors borders on passenger abuse; I don’t mean
abuse in an illegal context, I mean abuse in terms of power and using
their position to harm, rather than to help the people they have been
empowered to serve. Agency administrators have absolute power, passengers
have none, and as a result, officials routinely make decisions contrary
to passenger needs with no threat of recourse by, or accountability to
passengers for their actions and decisions.
Here are some examples of the types of
decisions I am referring to:
1. A person was approved for
paratransit services because of a cold-related disability, but that
person must wait outside in the cold for up to ½ hour because paratransit
won’t call upon arrival;
2. Paratransit excludes every new
“premium” service the UTA offers from its service area including, among
others, flex route busses, the streetcar, and express busses. The
fundamental question here is why is a public
service provider excluding entire bus and train lines?
3. Paratransit uses bus times
(understand this means fixed-route busses only, no Trax
or other premium services) to define an acceptable maximum paratransit
trip duration. Bus-only is the standard because “fixed route buses” is
the language in the ADA and is the law’s bare minimum standard. It is
Ludacris and quite telling of the supervisor’s mindset to listen to them
explain how bus-only trip times is the standard without giving any
consideration to the fact that the entire UTA system has adapted to Trax and other premium services.
4. A passenger lives 5 houses outside of
the ¾-mile boundary, and the bus won’t pick him up in front of his house,
instead he must wait at the corner, in the elements;
5. When this same individual pointed out
that the bus had to drive past his house to get to the designated pick up
spot, UTA supervisors scouted the area in a car and prescribed an
approach drivers must take to avoid having the bus drive past his house;
6. Paratransit used to have a taxi
service program where passengers could be picked up in a taxi and the
trip was then paid by the UTA. This service was canceled. Paratransit
supervisors have told me the average paratransit ride cost $40 in the UTA
paratransit buses, but taxis can usually get me where I want to go for
less than $20. When I asked paratransit supervisors why the service was
canceled, they lied to me and told me that “the UTA requires drivers go
through background checks, and the taxi companies refuse to comply with
the background check requirement.” I contacted a major taxi company who
used to do business with Paratransit, and the cab company told me they
background check their drivers annually. I don’t appreciate being lied
to. Taxis provide a better service to the rider at a cheaper cost to the
UTA; why was this program canceled, and why isn’t more being done to
restart it?
7. When scheduling a paratransit pick up
that is at the same time as the last fix-route bus of the day, FTA rules
allows for the pickup window to start at the time of the last fixed-route
bus and extend for ½ hour beyond that point. But paratransit requires the
pickup window to open ½ hour before the fixed
route is set to arrive, and close at the time the fixed route should
arrive. This means that for no good reason the disabled passenger must be
outside waiting for his/her bus ½ hour earlier than a non-disabled
passenger waiting on an equivalent fixed-route bus;
8. Your paratransit supervisors have a faulty
belief that the ADA prescribes service maximums, and that it would
somehow be a violation of federal law to provide better service than what
the ADA requires. In fact, the ADA prescribes minimums that the agency
must meet, and allows for agencies to exceed those standards if they
wish.
9. The UTA has a no cell phones policy
which prevents paratransit bus drivers from calling upon arrival; if this
policy was tweaked to allow paratransit drivers to call once the bus is
pulled over and parked, disabled passengers would not have to wait in the
elements.
10. The UTA has a “don’t reverse the
bus” policy. This policy keeps the bus from pulling into my parking area
in front of my house. Because of this, instead of being able to wait in
the comfort of my home, I must wait outside in the elements for the bus.
FYI, a Waste Management dump truck can get in/out of my driveway, and
paratransit buses have done so as well.
11. Paratransit scheduling policy only
allows buses to be sent to my work at 330, 430, and 530pm. These
predetermined pick up times needlessly inconvenience customers while
further demonstrating a lack of customer focus.
12. The paratransit scheduling
department is so erratic that the running joke among my fellow riders is
that scheduling is done by “an untrained monkey”. For example, they have
1 bus with 4 riders going from 1900 W over to 3300 E. Back to 700 W, back
to 1300 E, back to 5400 W. There are passengers who leave work at 4:30pm
who average arriving at home by 7pm because of how routes are scheduled.
The general feeling among passengers is that Paratransit is using
antiquated, outdated software that is incapable of effective scheduling;
13. Paratransit has a “subscription
service” that allows riders to set automatic trips if they are going to
the same place at the same time of day for a longer period of time. Once
again demonstrating a lack of customer focus, paratransit can take 75
days to recognize a consistent event—30 days for the rider to demonstrate
a “consistent ridership pattern” before an application can be filed, and
then 45 days to process the application. they won’t take advanced request
(such as when I told them 1 month ago that my new college semester starts
January 7); my semester will be mostly over before they accept and approve
my application. Whenever I complain about the subscription service,
paratransit supervisors always say “the subscription service is not
required
by the ADA, so we can set our own rules and
policies.” Translation: We don’t have to provide this service at all, so
be glad for what you got.
14. The reasonable service modification
rules released by the FTA require a 5-minute call ahead system. These
rules have been in place for nearly 2 years, and paratransit still does
not have a working system in place, nor have they established a temporary
work around that would satisfy the requirements of the rule until the
final system is developed. These call ahead systems are not new;
Anchorage Alaska has used a similar system for years, as do ridesharing
services like Uber and Lyft. The delay in implementation of the call
ahead system is an unacceptable and inexcusable stall tactic. How long
must we wait for the UTA to comply with federal rules?
The point of the above list is to
demonstrate an ongoing list of power-based abuses that occur regularly by
paratransit leadership against passengers and to illustrate a pattern of
supervisor’s decisions that needlessly and always go against the needs of
customers, even when the opposite decision would better meet the needs of
the customer while having a neutral/negligible impact on the paratransit
service or department. Many of these issues are because paratransit
supervisors choose not to do more or do better (such as expanding service
coverage rules), and other issues are the result of policies put in place
by paratransit supervisors (such as a no cell phone policy). The
frustrating thing is that paratransit supervisors then point to these
decisions and policies as justification for not providing a service while
being seemingly unaware that they are the ones who made the decisions and
implemented these policies in the first place, and that they could change
or modified these decisions and policies at any time they choose.
I believe the root of all these problems
is the Paratransit service is a monopoly who does not need to be
accountable to its passengers. As a publicly funded public service
provider who is also a monopoly, I think UTA managers have an extra ethical
and moral responsibility to provide the balance not provided by a fair
market economy, to insure that customers remain
the focus, and to diligently guard against an insulated institutionalism
that values the organization above its customers.
I would strongly encourage you to
evaluate the resources of the department, and to investigate the
direction and leadership of the department and to determine whether
passengers are being faithfully served to the best of the UTA’s
potential, or if there are leadership, structural, or resource issues in
place that prevent the UTA’s passengers from being better and more fully
served.
I’m tired of being treated like a
second-class citizen who should be grateful for the crumbs being given to
me rather than being treated like a customer to be respected and whose
business must be earned and maintained.
Sincerely,
Jim Reed
Phone: (312) 925 1579
E-mail: Jim275.2@gmail.com
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