Critics call buses unreliable for those with disabilities

By Jennifer Lafleur And Lorraine Kee
Of The Post-Dispatch
Tuesday, Sept. 5, 2000

Despite the hour, light from a single window glows in the darkened Maryland Heights apartment complex.

The clock says 4 a.m., and Robyn Wallen has been up for an hour, getting ready for work. Inside Wallen's apartment, her son, 12, sleeps in a back bedroom. Her mother, wearing a duster, watches a rerun of Montel Williams' talk show. Wallen flits about the apartment, picking up job training books and stuffing them into a backpack. She and her mother map a strategy for booking a reservation the next day on Call-A-Ride, the van system run by the Bi-State Development Agency to transport people with disabilities.

"It took two hours to get through yesterday," her mother says.

So goes Wallen's ordeal of finding a way to work, a common experience for Wallen and thousands of other people with disabilities who live in metro St. Louis.

For many reasons, buses are an unreliable way to work for disabled people, critics say. Thus, Call-A-Ride, which was supposed to fill in the gaps, has instead become the transportation of choice for disabled people. But more than one out of 10 people who want rides on Call-A-Ride can't get them.

On this day, Wallen gets a ride.

At 4:22, the pick-up time assigned to her by Call-A-Ride, the van pulls up. Wallen's white cane helps her navigate her way to the van and she settles into a seat. Her ride leaves the parking lot, turning east down a deserted street where the signal lights flash above empty intersections. She rides alone, except for the driver, toward Highway 40 (Interstate 64).

A little before 5 a.m., the van pulls up in front of a downtown St. Louis office building -- more than two hours before Wallen's shift begins.

In just two weeks on a new job in telephone sales, Wallen has tried every which way to get to work. When she changed jobs, Wallen lost her standing reservation with Call-A-Ride because she was taking a different route to work. She rode paratransit and MetroLink for three days. On the third day though, she received a warning for being late after her reservation was changed to a later drop-off time. After that, she took taxis and accepted rides from friends.

Her new job is the first position Wallen has had with a private-sector employer.

"To be honest, getting that job was the only thing that gave me the confidence to fight like I have to get there every day," Wallen says. "This job for me is like winning the lottery."

Call-A-Ride carried about 436,000 people with disabilities in the fiscal year that ended in June. That was a record for the transit agency, which carries people with disabilities to jobs, doctor appointments, grocery shopping and other errands.

Call-A-Ride started with one van in 1984. Today, the Call-A-Ride fleet consists of 63 vehicles, says Janis Shetley, director of paratransit operations for Bi-State.

"The commitment to this has been substantial," Shetley says.

The Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to allow people with disabilities to use the same public transportation everyone else uses.

That meant buses, equipped with working lifts, should be the first transportation option for people with disabilities. But critics say that they encounter broken lifts, some drivers who pass them by and others who fail to call off stops.

So Call-A-Ride has become the primary transportation for disabled people. Call-A-Ride has denied on average 7,300 requests a month for the past two years. In the same period, Call-A-Ride carried 35,000 riders. In other words, if the number of no-shows are included, about 15 percent of people who wanted rides couldn't get them.

The Office of Civil Rights in the Federal Transit Administration, which falls under the U.S. Department of Transportation, is charged with compliance and monitoring of accessibility in public transportation. The transportation department's regulations say transit agencies can't by "any operational pattern or practice" significantly limit the availability of service to people with disabilities.

ADA casts a safety net

The ideal of the ADA was to get folks riding the fixed-route system, says Arthur Lopez, director of civil rights for the Federal Transit Administration. Fixed-route systems refer to standard bus routes and light-rail services such as MetroLink.

Under the law, transit authorities also were required to provide a complementary service to its fixed routes for disabled people who weren't able to use the fixed-route system. That curb-to-curb van or paratransit service -- Bi-State's Call-A-Ride -- provides transportation for people with disabilities from a pick-up point to within 3/4 mile of a fixed route.

"ADA wasn't designed to give the disabled community more service than the general public," paratransit director Shetley says.

Says Lopez: "Paratransit was only meant to be a safety net for the fixed route."

That's what the law intended. In reality, 3/4 mile service is impractical, so Call-A-Ride goes farther than what the law requires, Shetley says.

"Most people don't live within 3/4 miles of bus routes," she says. "We wouldn't be serving most of St. Louis County, and I don't know if that's very effective."

Call-A-Ride transports an average of 1,400 riders each day. A Bi-State official says the agency does not track how many people with disabilities rides its fixed route system.

David Newburger, a St. Louis civil rights attorney and member of Paraquad's board of directors, argues that paratransit services were a mistake from their inception. Demand, Newburger said, will always exceed supply.

"What you really need is a better bus system," Newburger says.

Buses are called unreliable

On a hot, sunny July afternoon, Anthony Smith waited for a bus in downtown Clayton at the intersection of Forsyth Boulevard and Central Avenue. Smith uses a wheelchair.

When the bus arrived, the driver told Smith that the wheelchair lift was broken and to catch the next bus. A skeptical Smith said he is bypassed three or four times a week.

"Sometimes they just don't want to take the time," added Smith, 38, who said he lived in the Central West End.

In this case, the bus lift really was broken.

A Bi-State record on the bus indicates the bus lift was last reported broken on July 19, says Darren Curry, superintendent of maintenance for Bi-State's Brentwood Service Area. The record did not reflect any repairs between July 19 and eight days later when a reporter saw the bus pull away leaving Smith.

Transporation department regulations say lifts must be "repaired promptly." Buses with broken lifts are supposed to be taken out of service by the end of that day and repaired before they are returned to service.

The transit agency then must find a substitute bus so service isn't interrupted, regulations say. However, if no substitute can be found, the agency can keep the bus in service with an inoperable lift for three days from the day it was reported broken. Lifts are sometimes broken against too-high curbs or from heavy scooters and wheelchairs, Bi-State officials say.

Floretta Mitchell is the division director for Bi-State's Brentwood Service Area, where the bus with the broken lift is stationed. Mitchell says buses are randomly checked before drivers head out on their routes. Given the crush of vehicles leaving on their routes at one time, Bi-State is unable to test every lift before it hits the road, Mitchell says.

Further, Mitchell says, buses are sometimes sent out with broken lifts. They're needed to meet Bi-State service demands. The buses may be awaiting parts, and often substitute buses can't be found. If a driver has a broken lift, she says, Bi-State policy requires the driver to call and report the problem, find out when the next available bus with a working lift is coming and inform the waiting patron. Failing that, a supervisor is contacted and other transportation arrangements are made.

In total, Bi-State has 580 buses. About 93 percent have lifts. The agency plans to be fully equipped with lifts next year.

"Bi-State is not neck-deep in money," says Herb Dill, president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 788 which represents Bi-State's drivers. "They can't make sure every bus, every day, on every run is going to accommodate a wheelchair.

"There are going to be breakdowns and there are going to be delays," Dill says. "Bi-State overall does a very good job considering the resources they have."

Even when lifts on fixed-route buses are working, some people with disabilities say they can't rely on them.

Some complain that bus drivers -- despite the law -- fail to call stops and fail to announce routes as riders board. That poses a problem for people who are blind or have low vision, says David Ekin, executive director of the St. Louis Society for the Blind.

"Calling stops would help other people as well," Ekin says.

Wallen, who is legally blind, once recalled asking a driver what bus it was.

"He said. 'Can't you read the sign?'" Wallen recalls. "I said, 'No, sir, I can't.'"

"That's what this is for," Wallen told the driver, showing him her white cane.

A spot check by the Post-Dispatch of nine different routes on Aug. 9 in St. Louis and St. Louis County found that drivers did not call bus stops except when specifically asked to do so. MetroLink drivers regularly announce stops. Bi-State's Mitchell conceded that drivers don't always call routes as required by federal regulation.

"Bus drivers are human," the union's Dill says. "And when dealing with the demands and stress of the job, dealing with traffic and everything else, occasionally a stop or crossing will be missed."

Because of the problem with buses, some people with disabilities say they have turned to Call-A-Ride.

Some disabled people say they call early and often to make Call-A-Ride reservations. One man with a visual impairment said he has taken his cell phone to the office, calling on his breaks. Wallen says her mother and friends have called to book rides for her. And even then there's no guarantee they will get a ride.

Because of demand, reservations fill up quickly. Bi-State books seven days in advance. About 50 percent of requests are standing reservations.

Paratransit services director Shetley says she has repeatedly sought to increase the total number of vans in the Call-A-Ride fleet.

"We've been running at 63 for a couple years now," Shetley says. The last year the total number of Call-A-Ride vans increased was from 59 in 1994, an agency official says.

E-mail: jlafleur@post-dispatch.com \Phone: 314-340-8296
E-mail: lkee@post-dispatch.com \Phone: 314-340-8255