Mobility Management is customer-driven. Trainings are provided that focus on:
An individuals travel needs:Participants of the Mobility Management training will:
Explanations can be given on:
Mobility Management Travel Trainings
There are five main categories in which travel trainings can be implemented:
1. Human Service Agencies
Many human service agencies started their own transportation systems because public transit agencies were either unwilling or incapable of providing the services that the human service agency clients needed. With the increase in coordination, many of the human service agencies are returning their transportation needs back to the public transportation providers. These efforts are often achieved through contracts. Travel trainings at a human service agency can be implemented in two ways, train the staff or train the clients. In both cases, the local public transportation provider will participate as well as a Mobility Manager being the main facilitator.
2. Transportation Providers
Transportation providers are often looking for ways to increase ridership and efficiency. Travel trainings can be a great way to achieve both of these goals! Locating a group of potential riders and showing them how to utilize your system will encourage them to become consistent riders. In addition, it is imperative for the public transportation providers to participate in all types of trainings to assist the Mobility Managers with implementing the training session.
3. Medical Field
Medical transportation is one of the most talked about topics in the transportation field. It has been made clear that patients are suffering and dying due to lack of transportation to and from medical facilities as well as misappropriated uses of ambulance services. Travel trainings can greatly benefit hospitals, ambulance services, nursing homes, adult care facilities, and medical facilities through learning the transportation options you can offer to your patients. Currently, the Rural Medical Transportation Network is reaching out through public education and pilot programs to assist in the current need. Mobility Managers in Southern Illinois have joined forces and look forward to assisting medical professionals regaining the health of their clients through travel trainings.
4. Educational Facilities
Travel trainings can be implemented for several specialty groups of educational facilities that span from all ages. Special needs high school students can benefit from learning how to utilize the public transportation system to retain their independence after graduating from high school. In many cases, these students may not have the ability to drive, but understanding that they can utilize the transit system to obtain employment, continuing education, and social activities can play a large part of their quality of life. Also, higher educational facilities that offer GED courses can benefit from understanding how the transportation agency can provide transportation for these students. These travel trainings can be done two ways: train the staff/facility or train the students.
5. One-on-One
Mobility Management is customer focused and customer driven. Trainings can be very beneficial to clients in a one-on-one setting. These trainings can teach the client step by step how to utilize public transportation starting from calling to schedule the ride through actual riding. These trainings promote independence and eliminate any uncertainties the client may have.
"The Business Case for Mobility Management"
By: Jon Burkhardt and Jim McLary
Introduction
What is this thing called mobility management? It's a strategic approach to managing a coordinated community-wide transportation network with multiple operating partners.
What are its benefits from a business perspective? It can help transit systems reduce their operating expenses and it can offer more mobility to a community's residents.
This article (the first in a series) provides an overview of mobility management and its benefits.
Mobility Management: What is it?
Mobility Management is a customer-driven, market-based approach to transportation services. It focuses on:Mobility management includes (1) all activities involved with identifying customer travel needs and coordinating a variety of service providers to address those needs — and doing so in a manner that is effective for the customer and efficient for the taxpayer. It also involves (2) efforts to improve the performance of public transportation in conjunction with the management of community-wide transportation resources, thus including traffic management strategies and the coordination of public transportation with infrastructure development and land use policies.
The basic mobility management functions include:
The detailed, comprehensive package of mobility management activities can be described as service development and system management activities.
Service development activities include:
System management activities include:
The Economic Benefits of Mobility Management
Mobility management offers substantial cost savings and increased service effectiveness. The economic benefits of mobility management are quite similar to those offered by coordinating transportation services: By working for greater efficiency in the use of transportation resources, mobility management can lower the costs of providing services. Most communities apply such cost savings to increase the numbers of trips served, thus satisfying a greater proportion of the latent demand of public transportation services and increasing overall service effectiveness. The combination of increased efficiency and increased effectiveness can create great improvements in unit costs, such as costs per trip, per mile, or per hour. Transit agencies in the Denver, Detroit, and Portland (Oregon) regions are now realizing savings of about $2 million or more per year by applying mobility management strategies tailored to the unique needs and resources of their communities.
Denver, Colorado: RTD
The Denver Regional Transportation District (RTD) is the public transportation provider for 40 cities and towns in all or portions of 8 counties around Denver. The service area population is more than 2.5 million persons located in 2,327 square miles.2 RTD’s operations include fixed bus routes, express buses, light rail, shuttles, ADA paratransit services, call-n-Rides, Senior Ride, vanpools, free shuttle services on the downtown mall, and other services. More than 86 million riders used RTD’s services in 2005; the 2006 operating budget is $393 million and average weekday boardings are now 290,000. Key mobility management programs include RTD’s vanpool program, the user-side taxi subsidy program, call-n-Ride, Bike-n-Ride, and guaranteed ride home. Other components include bus passes distributed by employers and RTD support of local transportation management organizations. Mobility management programs under development include additional taxi services, car sharing, feeder bus services to light rail, and transit oriented land use developments.4 RTD is attempting to create services that are “closer to the customer” and more cost-effective than typical services. RTD is now more interested in funding and managing certain services than providing them.
These two of RTD's several mobility management programs are saving RTD over $2 million per year while providing access to increased numbers of persons. Other mobility management programs (such as ADA-eligible passengers using the general public paratransit program and the Front Range Express intercity bus service from Colorado Springs to Denver) add even more savings. These new services have been enthusiastically embraced by the public in the Denver region. A recent tax referendum focusing on new rail and highway services generated a 66 percent approval rating at the ballot box.
Detroit, Michigan: Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation (SMART)
A fiscal crisis in the early 1990s led SMART to reassess its agency mission, customer base, and services. Spurred by a $20 million deficit and an impending local property tax referendum, SMART redesigned its services to
SMART now uses more than 600 buses and provides 11 million rides per year, an all-time high, and is setting records in every sector of their business. The system has also become a model for other transit systems looking to make big changes.
Through SMART’s Community Partnership Program, SMART decentralized that which could be provided most effectively by the communities and centralized what SMART could do best. This helped improve service at the local level without spending more money. SMART now has partnerships with 73 local communities providing buses and technical assistance where needed. Over 246 small buses are operated by community partners. The program allows each community to develop transit that fits the needs of their residents and businesses. SMART offers functions such as community forums, coordinated dispatching, preventative maintenance, joint capital purchases, and travel training to their community partners, who can partake of these services or not, as they wish. Each program is different in each city.
SMART has capitalized on the determination of its riders and partners to fund vehicles, provide special services to riders, and create services that are uniquely tailored to local travel needs. They look to their local partners to create new ideas and then generate the support needed to get these ideas implemented.
In 2002, the cost of the Community Partnership Program was $7 million. Without this program, the services operated by SMART would have cost an additional $2.7 million, for a total cost of $9.7 million.6 Figures for later years are not available at this time but are expected to show even greater savings.
In Portland, Ride Connection operates under contract to Tri-Met, the local public transit authority, as an area-wide mobility manager for persons not well-served by regular public transit operations. Ride Connection is a nonprofit community organization that coordinates community agencies that provide rides for persons with disabilities and senior citizens without alternative transportation. Their service area includes 1.5 million persons in 3,000 square miles in three counties in Oregon and part of one county in Washington. They describe their mission as “linking accessible, responsive transportation with community need.” Operating in close collaboration with Tri-Met, Ride Connection has helped Tri-Met trim its ADA paratransit costs.
Ride Connection currently has 401 volunteers and 268 paid drivers. Ride Connection has consolidated administrative functions (such as driver training, compliance, and maintenance), but actual trips are brokered by Ride Connection and are delivered by their collaborative partners.
This division of labor helps maintain high-quality, personal services that are tailored to the unique needs of each individual community. Also, they can get funding not available to a public agency like Tri-Met (from foundations, corporations, individuals, others). Their volunteers provide trips that would be nearly impossible for a public transportation agency to provide. Ride Connection and Tri-Met also cooperatively provide a travel training program to enhance the mobility of persons with special travel needs. In 2000-2001, trips made through the Ride Connection brokerage cost $9.73 per trip versus $19.14 on Tri-Met’s LIFT program for ADA eligible riders. The probable cost savings to Tri-Met in that year were nearly $2 million: actual costs were $911,868 versus a probable cost of $2,884,819.
Whats needed for Mobility Management: Changing Perspectives, Changing Strategies
Mobility management represents a new strategic approach for the transit industry, and it requires changing some long-established patterns and practices. Mobility management
Mobility management requires that someone (some organization) take responsibility for managing a coordinated community-wide transportation service network comprised of the operations and infrastructures of multiple trip providers. The management component of this process entails focusing on and making visible improvements to the effectiveness, efficiency, and quality of the travel services being delivered. From a transit agency perspective, Mobility Management can achieve the more efficient use of existing resources in order to meet individual needs, as is called for in the research describing the need for a “new paradigm” for public transportation, a new approach to delivering transportation services.
The call for a new paradigm for transit is based on changing demographics and the emerging role of transportation in smart growth and environmental management activities. These forces will require transit systems to re-invent their service delivery model. The call for a redefined role for transit agencies is not new. APTA itself has published many articles and papers on “the new paradigm.” Many professionals have identified the need for a new transit image:
“Increasing access to public transportation is clearly the best way to create a stable, healthy and strong America.”
“Public transit must develop a vision of its role in serving existing and potential markets and ensure that transit benefits the entire community”
“Planning transportation ……solely around the work place or around median or average behavior obscures the real needs of Americans.”
“The vision for America's transportation future must portray a nation where people have freedom to make transportation choices and where travel options are prominent.”
Many human service agencies started their own transportation systems because the transit agencies were either unwilling or incapable of providing the service that the human service agency clients needed; many of these agencies now would gladly give up their transportation systems if they could get the service they need. But many transit agencies see their role as “providing mass transportation” and therefore have a difficult time adjusting their organizations and business models. A recent interview with FTA Administrator, James Simpson delivers this message very succinctly:
“I believe that one of the most important things we as industry leaders must do is to ask ourselves: “What business are we in?” For example, private passenger railroads like the
Pennsylvania and New York Central, among the most powerful business a century ago, are now extinct. Why? Because they failed to adapt. They had what I call “marketing myopia.” They viewed themselves as being in the railroad business instead of the people business. Don’t think mode…think people!”
The TCRP new paradigms report14 suggests some new models and new priorities. The three-tiered model embodies several basic principles:
• (Re) establishment of the quality of the customer’s experience as a central, strategic focus for the organization;
• Separation of strategic responsibilities focused on the quality of the customer’s experience from responsibility and accountability for the actual production of goods and services; and a
• Systems of performance measurement that bring into balance the quality of the customer’s experience (the emerging strategic goal) and the efficiency with which resources are used (the production goal); The new transit paradigm also has a reliance on expanded partnerships and alliances with both public and private organizations and service providers (for-profit and not-for-profit). This is to ensure responsiveness to shifting customer needs and cost effectiveness in meeting them. Actions would also include an introduction of state-of-the-art information technologies that can link the mobility management organization to both its partners and its individual customers in real time.
Why should I be involed in Mobility Management?
Why should transit systems practice Mobility Management? First, it makes good business sense. As shown by the examples above, transit operators can both reduce their operating costs and expand the services that they provide. Second, SAFETEA-LU provides incentives for transit systems through the 5316 JARC and 5317 New Freedom programs. SAFETEA-LU makes mobility management a capital project and thus eligible for 80% funding. Not only is Mobility Management an 80/20 program, other non-DOT federal money can be used as local match. Third, as transit managers expand their range of services, either through operations or partnerships, their constituency grows. If your constituency grows, your support base grows. As the support base grows, the funding follows. Fourth, it is our job. The job of a transit system is to move people, and if we don’t rise to the challenge of helping all travelers, someone else will. This may involve changing some perspectives and practices — not necessarily an easy thing to do — but not meeting changing circumstances would harm our industry.
Finally, it is the right thing to do. As stated earlier, many human service agencies started transportation companies because no one else would provide the service they needed. Over $4.0 billion is spent annually on Human Service transportation. If this human service transportation was coordinated with the public systems, the savings could be well over $1.0 billion annually. This money would be available to provide trips for the unmet needs which we hear about daily.
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