Paratransit scheduling software for ADA contractors and small transit programs

What does paratransit scheduling software have to do?

It has to book a trip from a request made the day before, offer every request a pickup within an hour of the time the rider wants, and keep each pickup inside its pickup window. Those duties come from 49 CFR 37.131, and a company running the service for a transit agency carries them too, because 49 CFR 37.23 requires the agency to make sure its contractor meets every Part 37 rule that would apply if the agency ran the trips itself. The full rule list is in working as an ADA paratransit contractor, who qualifies is in how to apply for ADA paratransit, and what agencies pay is in paratransit cost per trip. This page covers what the schedule and the records have to hold so those rules can be met day after day.

A paratransit booking differs from a Medicaid ride in two ways. The agency has to know the origin, destination, time and number of people traveling, and Appendix D to the rule says it should not even ask why the person is traveling. The standard is also judged across the whole service. FTA’s circular C 4710.1 treats a pattern of late pickups, trip denials, missed trips or long rides as a capacity constraint, which the rule prohibits, and it expects agencies to document and analyze each one. When a contractor runs the service, that data comes from the contractor’s dispatch and vehicle records.

What does a booking have to check before the agency accepts it?

The trip’s addresses have to fall inside the service area, its time inside the service hours, and its fare has to match the rider’s party. All three come from 49 CFR 37.131, and the ADA paratransit glossary entry has the one-line version.

• Service area. For bus service it is a corridor three-fourths of a mile on each side of every fixed route, plus a three-fourths-mile circle at each route’s end and any small area the corridors surround. Outside the core area the agency may widen the corridors up to 1 1/2 miles. Rail service is a three-fourths-mile circle around each station. Appendix D adds that a rider who lives outside the corridor but can reach a point inside it must be picked up there. An agency does not have to serve land outside its own jurisdiction where it has no legal authority to operate.
• Service hours. Paratransit runs the same hours and days as the fixed route, so the booking has to accept the first and last trips of the route’s day.
• Fare. The most an agency may charge is twice the full fixed-route fare for a similar trip at a similar time of day. A companion pays the same fare as the rider, a personal care attendant rides free, and a trip guaranteed to a social service agency or other organization may be priced higher.

How does a booking turn into a pickup window?

A booking carries three times: the time negotiated with the rider, the window around that time, and the estimated arrival, which moves inside the window as the day changes. Software that keeps one pickup time per trip cannot tell a harmless change in the estimate from a change that needs a call to the rider.

• The request. The agency has to take a reservation made the day before the trip. It keeps the reservation service open during at least the normal business hours of its administrative offices, and during comparable hours before a service day when those offices are closed. Appendix D gives an example: offices open 9 to 5 means the line stays open 9 to 5 even on the Sunday before a Monday service day, and an answering machine can take the calls. The agency may negotiate the time but cannot require a trip to start more than one hour before or after the time the rider wants.
• The window. FTA allows a reasonable window around the negotiated time, typically 20 to 30 minutes, placed after the time or split around it, and calls a window longer than 30 minutes unacceptable. The pickup window entry covers how early, on-time and late pickups are defined.
• Moving the estimate. The estimate can move inside the window with no call: in FTA’s example a rider promised 1 p.m. with a 15-minute window each way can have the van move to 1:10 when a rider is added to the run. A change that pushes the pickup out of the window means renegotiating the time, which FTA says must happen no later than the day before, and if the rider says no or cannot be reached the trip runs at the time already negotiated. Scheduling that routinely fails to protect the window is itself a capacity constraint.
• Appointments. A rider with an appointment can ask for a drop-off time instead of a pickup time, but not both. The trip out is scheduled to arrive by the appointment and the return to the rider’s pickup time. FTA encourages drop-offs no more than 30 minutes before the appointment and no later than it, and some agencies schedule them no later than 5 minutes before.
• Requests with no run yet. A call-taker can accept a request and confirm the time with the rider, then place the trip on a run later. FTA calls these trips confirmed but unscheduled and says they are not a waiting list.

How should subscription trips be scheduled?

Subscription trips can fill no more than half of the trips available at a given time of day, unless there is spare non-subscription capacity. 49 CFR 37.133(b) sets that limit, and it is measured for each time of day, not on the day’s total. Appendix D gives the arithmetic: if a system can provide 400 trips at 8 a.m., no more than 200 can be subscription trips.

The exception runs both ways. In the same example, if non-subscription requests at 8 a.m. stay at 150 over a long enough period to show a pattern, the provider may carry 250 subscription trips in that hour. If non-subscription demand later grows and capacity has not, the extra trips go back to the non-subscription side. When subscription demand is high, the agency can use its negotiation allowance to move some trips to other times. The number to watch is each hour’s subscription share of capacity, not a fleet-wide average.

Subscription is the one place a service may keep a waiting list or limit trips by purpose. Appendix D’s example is subscription service at peak work times limited to work trips, and it adds that the same rider could be wait-listed for an 8 a.m. subscription but not for paratransit in general. A subscription trip is still a complementary paratransit trip, so the rules on ride length and timeliness apply to it. FTA also notes that the most efficient run for a subscription trip changes over time, and suggests schedulers regularly review the subscriptions they have accepted.

Changes need a process. When a rider reports a temporary change, such as a vacation, and the subscription schedule is not adjusted, the resulting no-show is the agency’s failure and cannot be held against the rider. The same holds when a partner agency’s list of subscription riders is out of date: that is a failure between the two agencies, not the rider’s no-show. A series that can skip or move a single date without being rebuilt, and a note of who reported the change and when, are worth testing before you commit to a system. For how standing rides work in medical transportation, see NEMT standing orders.

What counts as a late pickup, a denial or a missed trip?

FTA’s circular defines each event, and the data you keep has to be enough to apply the definitions. A trip denial is a request the agency does not accept, or can only offer a time outside the one-hour negotiation window, which is a denial even when the rider accepts the offer. A missed trip is a confirmed trip that fails because the agency failed: the van leaves before the window opens or before the required wait ends, arrives after the window closes, or never arrives. How early, on-time and late pickups follow from the pickup window, and how brokers count a provider’s version of the same event is in missed trip. FTA says high rates of missed trips from late arrivals often mean the service needs more capacity, and that reviewing the data can expose geocoding errors or map problems in the system used for scheduling.

How long can a paratransit ride be?

A ride is too long only when it is long compared with the same trip on the agency’s fixed route, counting every part of the trip, and FTA rejects both a flat maximum and a multiple of the fixed-route time. It suggests sampling, weekly or monthly, the trips longer than about 45 or 60 minutes, which takes pickup and drop-off times for every trip. Medical programs set their own limits, in many cases a cushion on top of the direct drive, and those are in maximum ride time.

Which delays does the agency excuse?

Only delays outside the agency’s control. Under 37.131(f)(3)(ii), weather or traffic conditions that affect all vehicles and could not be anticipated when the trip was scheduled do not count toward a pattern. FTA draws the line in these examples.

Backup capacity in FTA’s description means floater vehicles, backup drivers, supervisors who can respond with spare vehicles, or other providers hired for service as needed. When a van goes down at 9 a.m., the dispatcher needs to see which pickups are now at risk of missing their window, earliest first, before choosing which run to cover.

What records protect a rider and the contractor?

For every trip, keep the vehicle’s location, its arrival and departure times, and the address the driver went to. FTA recommends that an agency check each recorded no-show against exactly those facts before proposing to suspend a rider, and remove any that were recorded incorrectly. When a contractor runs the trips, its dispatch and vehicle records are that evidence, and repeat no-shows walks through the check.

The schedule also has to treat round trips correctly. After a no-show on the trip out, FTA requires the return to stay on the schedule unless the rider or another reliable source says it is not needed, and it suggests calling the rider to ask. A system that cancels the return on its own works against that rule, so test what yours does.

The pattern test for suspensions and the limits on how long one can last are in the same guide, and the basic definition is in no-show.

Which numbers should a contractor pull every month?

The on-time, missed-trip, denial, ride-time and phone figures for the whole service, then the same figures cut five ways. FTA lists the cuts: portions of the service area, destinations, days and times of day, ambulatory versus non-ambulatory riders, and individual riders. Its example is a service with high systemwide on-time performance whose weekday mornings are much lower, or where trips for riders who need accessible vehicles run on time far less often than the rest.

Two more figures belong on the same page:

• Drop-offs for appointments. FTA treats a pattern of untimely drop-offs on trips with stated appointment times as a capacity constraint.
• Phone hold times. FTA prefers the share of calls answered within a threshold, such as a set percentage under 2 minutes and a higher one under 5, to an average, because averages hide bad hours. It calls prompt answers to calls about late pickups especially important, since a rider waiting on a late van may not be able to stay on hold. It also notes that too few reservation staff who speak a caller’s language can lengthen hold times for those callers and become a capacity constraint of their own.

For the targets one agency wrote into a contract, see working as an ADA paratransit contractor. The National Transit Database reaches applicants for and recipients of Section 5307 or 5311 grants under 49 CFR 630.2, so the filing is usually the agency’s job. NTD reporting for contractors covers the data your contract may have you supply.

What changes for a small transit program?

A public entity that runs fixed routes owes complementary paratransit, and one that runs only demand response is measured by equivalent service instead when its fleet includes vehicles that are not accessible. 49 CFR 37.121 requires complementary paratransit from each public entity that operates a fixed-route system, except commuter bus, commuter rail and intercity rail. FTA’s circular says true demand response service does not require it.

A public dial-a-ride open to everyone must buy new vehicles that are accessible unless its service is equivalent under 49 CFR 37.77. The test covers seven things: response time, fares, area, hours and days, trip purpose, information and reservations, and capacity constraints. A Section 5311 recipient files a certificate with its state program office before buying an inaccessible vehicle, and no certificate is valid for more than one year. The comparison is between riders with and without disabilities, not against a bus. A system with waiting lists, denials or poor on-time performance can still be equivalent, as long as riders with disabilities do not fare worse. If every vehicle is fully accessible, the equivalency test does not apply, though the general nondiscrimination rules still do.

FTA expects subrecipients that plan to buy inaccessible vehicles to compare riders who need accessible vehicles with riders who do not on five measures at a minimum: trip denials and missed trips, how often they are wait-listed, on-time performance, ride times and phone hold times. That is the same data a larger contractor tracks, split by type of rider instead of compared with a bus.

When one dial-a-ride service also meets the agency’s paratransit duty, the paratransit rules apply to that part of it. FTA recommends recording requests and completed trips separately for riders who are ADA paratransit eligible and for everyone else. If the general-public service cannot take every request, eligible riders get scheduling priority. FTA’s circular says Sections 5311 and 5307 usually fund general-public dial-a-ride and Section 5310 usually funds service for seniors and people with disabilities. Section 5310 grants and rural transportation grants cover how the money works.

Running paratransit trips in HealthRide

Book a standing ride once as a recurring trip and HealthRide keeps it going, so skipping or moving one day leaves the rest of the series alone. The dispatch board shows every trip on its driver’s lane, and Ryder Go plans the whole day in one click. Each trip keeps its timestamps, GPS-recorded miles and the recorded wait on a no-show, and the on-time report in reports shows punctuality overall and per driver. Riders are texted a reminder ahead of the ride, with a link to follow the driver live.