[Colorado-Talk] RTD's Conundrum With Access-on-Demand

[Curtis Chong]

conundrum Hello to my fellow Coloradans:

 

When the Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) started providing
Access-on-Demand service to paratransit customers to the tune of $25 per
ride, sixty rides per month, and no restrictions as to when and where a
customer would be picked up or dropped off within its large service area,
its intentions may have been altruistic, but the end result seems to be a
system that is now costing RTD more than $1.2 million every month. RTD is
telling us that this cost is "not sustainable."

 

I have to wonder how it is that RTD created this spectacular disaster in the
first place. Did its well-paid management staff not know that the
traditional Access-a-Ride service was plagued with so many problems that
most people chose not to sign up for the service unless they were desperate
for transportation? Did RTD management not understand that they would create
much less resentment and public acrimony if they had started by offering a
little bit of service and gradually expanded the service as they could
afford to provide it rather than throwing opening the floodgates, offering
everybody everything for nothing, then finding themselves in a position
where they had to take services away from people who have now become
dependent on it? Why is RTD surprised that Access-on-Demand has been flooded
with a lot of new customers who would never have applied to receive
Access-a-Ride services to begin with?

 

The Access-on-Demand service as we now know it has been operating for a
little more than two years. Before Access-on-Demand, what did the people who
now rely on this service do to go to and from work, participate in social
events, or travel to medical appointments? I am fairly confident that while
some folks did stay at home, other people found alternative ways to get
around--ways, I fully recognize, that cost a lot more than Access-on-Demand
does today.

 

RTD is now in an untenable position. No matter what it does to keep
Access-on-Demand alive, it will incur the wrath of a community of
paratransit customers who will feel that they have been forced to make a
sacrifice in their personal independence simply to help a large government
bureaucracy to reduce spending. We, the blind community and the community of
folks with other disabilities, will experience  a reduction in one or more
aspects of the Access-on-Demand program. The hope is that RTD will learn
from its mistakes, obtain meaningful data from the community of paratransit
riders, and implement cost-saving reductions in Access-on-Demand that hurt
the fewest individuals.

 

Sincerely,

 

Curtis Chong

 

 

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