Innovative Operating Strategies for Paratransit Service.

摘要

Paratransit services are a very large industry providing transportation services for disabled and elderly customers across the country. Demand for these services has been drastically and continuously growing since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) and there are no signs indicating a reversal of this trend. More than 30 million paratransit trips are requested yearly from the U.S. population. As these services are very costly and mandated by law, transit agencies work to deliver an adequate level of service in a cost effective manner and are always looking at ways to improve their performance and reduce their operating costs. However, the current operating policy adopted by most transit agencies is causing inefficiency. When an independently managed zoning operating strategy is adopted, cross-zonal customers need to be dropped off outside their pick-up zone; the service providers vehicle will bring the customers at destination, but is not allowed to pick up customers outside its own service zone. This zoning strategy clearly causes to forbid some of the ridesharing and to increase the empty trip miles driven, eventually increasing the costs of these services considerably, as cross-zonal customers can be as high as 30% of the daily demand (Los Angeles County). Furthermore, customers having pick-up and drop-off locations in different zones are required to rely on two different providers for their round-trip, with potentially different booking rules, and, therefore, they might experience a reduced level of service. To address the abovementioned issue, this project explores innovative strategies for operating ADA Paratransit services.