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Saturday, March 13, 2010
SunVan Schedule Slammed
By Lloyd Jojola
Journal Staff Writer
Some SunVan riders are blasting the city transit service, saying a change in scheduling means they can no longer get a ride close to their requested time.
The criticism comes after a change was made in the way reservations are handled for SunVan, a curb-to-curb transportation system for people with disabilities who can't ride the regular fixed-route bus system.
"When you used to call, the reservationist would really look to schedule you as close as possible to your time. Unfortunately, sometimes they did double and triple book the drivers, and the drivers were late," said Lucy Birbiglia, a rider who attended this week's meeting of the Advisory Committee on Transit for the Mobility Impaired. "Now they are often saying, 'You can have a time an hour from what you asked, and that's it. Take it or leave it.' "
The change was made because the agency was not meeting its goal of a 92 percent on-time rate for pickups, Transit Department director Bruce Rizzieri said. The rate was about 80-82 percent, he said, and the problem was that the agency was scheduling pickups — such as the multiple bookings mentioned by Birbiglia — that it could not meet.
SunVan ridership has been growing. This fiscal year, it is expected to post more than 200,000 passenger boardings, or an estimated increase of 1 or 2 percent. SunVan's budget is about $5.1 million, or about 12 percent of transit's overall budget.
Under last month's change, the agency is essentially committing only to pickup times it is fairly certain it can meet and trying to be more efficient in its bus routing so people are not on vans for long periods of time, Rizzieri said.
"So the complaints have shifted from late arrivals, late pickups, the van didn't show up at all, to now you're not giving me the time I want," he said. "But as the number of eligible people go up, we need to look at ways we can actually deliver on what we promise."
Art Schreiber, chairman of the state Commission for the Blind, and executive director Greg Trapp said in a letter, "Under the new policy, riders are offered a ride that may be up to an hour on either side of their requested time.
"The policy means that SunVan will provide the very worst service allowed by federal law, regardless of whether that service meets the needs of riders."
Rizzieri took issue with those comments. "What they're saying is that, before the change, you could call and you could pick any time you want to be picked up and we were giving you the ride. My contention is that, for a lot of those rides, we weren't picking you up within our scheduled half-hour window."
Under federal rules, the agency cannot deny users a ride, he said. And if a user requests a 7 a.m. ride, for example, it could make a pickup from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m.
Rizzieri said that, if the vans can't make a pickup at the requested time, it will offer riders two options, before and after the requested time.
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