There's a lot going on right now, and a lot of it's not good. You just have to scratch your head.
You’ll recall several weeks ago I did a monologue about how the RTA did not have a plan to replace their capital assets. In the simplistic language, they couldn’t replace a damn bus
Here we are several weeks later and, you guessed it, they're back. Now it's about the paratransit service for disabled riders, as per a great report by Blake Paterson of NOLA.com.
The RTA gets a chunk of its money from the federal government to conduct paratransit services. And it's federally mandated as a service for handicapped residents. And interestingly, one of the folks that Blake Paterson interviewed was none other than Carl Arradondo. Carl is visually impaired and relies upon the paratransit service. His experience is that it's anything but reliable. In fact, he says it's a crapshoot. It's consistently flawed.
Blake Paterson’s report paints a really dire picture of the agency's paratransit operations. He shares harrowing stories about what people have had to go through, at times sitting out in the rain for hours on end waiting for their ride. And the RTA leadership makes it sound like they didn't know it was going on or that it’s been a problem for years. In short–they’re violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The report also states that the agency inflated performance metrics and lacked basic policies and procedures around training and data retention. In basic terms: they lied.
They knew all along this wasn’t good and they weren’t engaged in the development of basic policies and procedures around training and data retention. You have to fill out reports to the federal government and others to make sure that you comply with the standards laid out.
Now they're slated to award a new contract in January, which would implement new software to help the agency more efficiently plan its paratransit routes. This fascinates me. Say you send a driver to pick somebody up in Gentilly, then go to Lakeview, then go to the far reaches of the Carrollton area uptown, and then swing by the warehouse district. Do you think it takes a brain surgeon to figure out that that's not a very efficient route?
Do you think when folks run a multitude of errands around the city they plan their route as to where they're going to go first, second, third, or fourth? It’s just common sense. They try to make this seem as though it's an incredible challenge to coordinate routes.
Hasn’t the RTA been in the transit business forever? They're serving approximately 1200 residents and they make about 226,000 trips each year with their handicap accessible vehicles. And now the panacea solution from heaven is a software program? Is there no other way to deal with this? They also never mention how much this new software cost.
This is not rocket science. But it is for the city government in New Orleans.
It all started to crumble when they brought the RTA in-house. They used to outsource it. It was a lot cheaper. They brought it in-house and it ended up costing more. Why? Because of the salary and benefits of the public employees of the RTA. In most other large cities, they do the exact opposite. They outsource it. Why? Because it's cheaper. It’s effective and more efficient.
Do you want to know one of the most shocking things? Lona Hankins, the new CEO of the RTA, said that the RTA meets with the Federal Transportation Administration Quarterly. And guess what? When asked she said paratransit operations never came up.
I’ll tell you what. Were I on the board and I read this article this morning, she's fired next. Because you're obviously not getting it. You have a history of complaints from paratransit riders. You know where you are in your capital asset plan. You know you haven't replaced these vehicles in an appropriate period. And you know that you're running schedules that are way behind.
