Modern Mobility Services

The problem

Every transit agency in the United States that runs buses or trains must also run a second, parallel service: door-to-door paratransit for riders whose disabilities prevent them from using the fixed route. Federal law guarantees the service, and federal regulation prescribes how it is delivered — response times, fares, and capacity standards are fixed by rule. Three decades of that prescription have produced the problem this subtitle addresses: the most expensive service in American transit, rising in cost year after year, under rules that leave an agency no lawful way to deliver it better.

The cost curve is the measurable core of the problem. The Government Accountability Office put the national average cost of an ADA paratransit trip at $29.30 in 2010 — about 3.5 times the $8.15 cost of a fixed-route trip (GAO-13-17). The curve did not flatten. Los Angeles County’s Access Services, the largest dedicated paratransit system in the country, reported an actual cost of $61.97 per trip ($50.06 per passenger) in FY2023. Paratransit is an entitlement funded out of the same operating budgets that pay for buses and trains, so every dollar of that growth is a dollar of frequency, coverage, or service hours not bought for every other rider.

Nor is the money buying measured quality. The service qualities riders feel most directly — how long they wait, and whether a requested trip is refused at all — are the outcomes the prescribed model tracks least. An agency that could serve the same riders faster, more reliably, and over a wider area with a different delivery model — on-demand booking, dynamic dispatching, a mixed fleet — has no lawful way to substitute it. The regulation specifies the form of the service; compliance with the form is what is audited. The result is a service that is simultaneously an entitlement, a budget pressure, and a frozen design: guaranteed to riders, unaffordable on its current trajectory, and barred by its own rules from testing the methods that might fix it.

$29.30Average cost of an ADA paratransit trip

$8.15Average cost of a fixed-route trip

Source: Government Accountability Office, ADA Paratransit (GAO-13-17, 2012).

The proposed solution

The fix is a controlled experiment. Instead of requiring every transit agency to deliver paratransit in exactly the prescribed way, the federal government would let a small number of agencies — no more than twenty, chosen competitively — deliver it differently, and would hold them to a contract proving the new way is better for the riders who use it.

An agency that wants to take part applies with a detailed plan. It must commit to serving a larger area than it does today, to letting riders book trips on demand with a guaranteed maximum wait, and to keeping fares at the level the disability law allows. It must describe the modern dispatching technology it will use — the kind of on-demand booking and routing that ride-hailing has made ordinary — and it must bring a formal letter of support from its local committee of riders with disabilities. The application is not paperwork that precedes the real commitment: the application is the commitment, a binding contract the agency is held to.

What counts as “better” is not left to each agency to define. Federal officials would write the definition into a rule within a year, working with the national disability council and with representatives of local rider committees, and the law itself sets the floor the definition cannot fall below: measured against the agency’s own service in the year before, average waits must come down, refused trips must come down, and service must expand — more hours, more territory, or both. An agency is judged against the service its own riders actually received, not against a national average.

Nothing about the underlying right changes. The service remains an entitlement; what is waived is the prescribed method of delivering it, exchanged for a stricter, measured one. Oversight runs for the life of the pilot: the federal government reviews every participating agency’s performance every year, and an agency that fails to meet its contract can have its permission cancelled — in which case the old prescribed service comes back as the fallback. Three years in, the government must report to Congress on what the experiment showed and whether it should become permanent. And the pilot runs on resources agencies already have: it authorizes no new federal money. What it trades is prescription for proof.

The fix is a controlled experiment.

The data case

Why a waiver with a contract is the sound instrument

The defect of the current regime is not its goals, which are the ADA’s own. It is that the regime regulates inputs and therefore cannot learn. Prescribed reservation windows, prescribed service criteria, and prescribed response standards freeze the delivery technology of the era in which they were written; an agency that adopts on-demand dispatching, dynamic routing, or a mixed fleet gains no regulatory credit for better outcomes and carries full compliance risk for deviating from the prescribed form. The predictable result is the one the cost data show: compliance without improvement.

Subtitle A inverts the regulatory object. What is specified is the outcome — shorter waits than the agency’s own baseline, fewer denials, more service — defined by rule, with the disability community at the table when the metrics are written and holding a formal gate at the application. What is freed is the method: the technologies and mobility models the purpose section names. And the arrangement is self-correcting in a way input regulation is not. Annual review measures the contract against the baseline; revocation returns a failing agency to the prescribed model; and the three-year report converts at most 20 local experiments into the evidence base for a permanent program — or for ending the experiment with the question answered.

That is the technical case. It does not require believing the new model always wins. It requires only the observation that a service costing $29.30 a trip in 2010 and $61.97 a trip in the largest system in 2023, delivered under rules that forbid testing anything else, is a service whose governing statute should contain a controlled way to test something else — with the riders’ representatives holding the pen on the definition of “better.”

$59Average cost per traditional trip

$9.10Per on-demand trip

Source: U.S. Department of Transportation, ITS Deployment Evaluation, ITS Knowledge Resources record 2019-B01342.