For over 30 years, paratransit service was initially set up for physically disabled people with partial or total struggled use of public transportation and don’t drive. But now, eligibility leeway, DEI and fraud have paratransit service expanded to serve everyone and dilute the application process.
The result is declining use of public transit coupled with overused paratransit service. Physically disabled people wait longer for rides to show up, with some left stranded or forced to cancel plans. Some riders are even suspended/expelled for alleged causes. Many Paratransit services even resort to contract with Uber and Lyft to take the overload. I trade stories with others with common experiences.
My local paratransit service is called Access Link, for whom I have been a certified (eligible) rider since 2002, being legally blind. Just the same, I have never been inside any their vehicles other than riding with another Access Link rider aa a friend or a PCA.
All my frustration and inconvenience led me to be curious of why Access Link had been going bad., and boy-oh-boy, I was amazed at what I learned in the past few months before writing this passage.
I had been talking to other people in my situation who shared similar stories as mine. I talked to fully-abled people with no disability at all who use Access Link, praising the paratransit service and I compiled their reasons for successfully signing up for a service like Access link that was supposed to be solely for people who have a physical disability that fully or partially affects their ability ride a bus or a train, such as walking, bending, berating, seeing or hearing. Although there were many reasonings, these were some of the most common things they had said:
“I get tired of walking.”
“Driving a car is getting too expensive.”
“It’s more convenient than taking a bus or train.”
“I lost my license because I didn’t pay my traffic tickets.”
“Uber and Lyft are cheaper this way.”
There are several reasons why so many people have been made eligible for paratransit, such as.
- Flawed application and certification process with applicants not even meeting with the person or party who decides their eligibility, leading to inaccuracies resulting in fully-abled applicants successfully certified as eligible while some physically disabled people are turned down.
- Excessive public advertising of the service and regularly drawn an overpowering abundance of applicants, including public ads and forums.
- Non-certified riders asking existing riders to schedule rides for themselves and come along as a friend, solely for the benefit of the non-certified rider. As a result, many trips have been scheduled for other people and certified riders are pawns in the game.
- Extreme online activity escaping the notice of Access Link, such as apps for all to use and the sharing of ID #s with to strangers and others, including illegal migrants.
- Existing riders or pubic agencies coaching other people into how they can apply successfully.
Originally, these problems started surfacing significantly about ten years ago. I had started to notice when people would ask me to “borrow” or “buy” my Access Link ID, or when notice in stores of people posting flyers in search of Access Link riders to “take them places”, they would sometimes even offer money to for a ride. Many fully-abled people who do this don’t care about others and don’t consider the people who need paratransit more than they do.
All of these problems could be remedied with some smart maneuver changes in the system, but too many people at NJTransit (which owns Access Link) are too condescending to explore any proper changes and thus, just double down on the current system.
Access Link advertises itself as opening doors for people with disabilities, but many think that in about 20 years from now, it will be fully overhauled to mainstream the public, just in the future of all paratransit nationwide.
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