Coordinating vehicles:
Many nursing homes, continuing care retirement communiites, assisted living, and senior housing complexes have their own buses which are often under-used. We need to explore ways that these facilities could coordinate with local public transportation and other human service providers so that these vehicles can be used more efficiently -- to serve more riders, non-residents.
Public Transit Awareness and Travel Training:
Residents of senior housing and independent living facilities can often make good use of public transportation to take individual trips -- if they know how to use public transit. Also, if they learn about the destinations they can reach , e.g., symphony, farmers' market, by public transit, they have motivation to use it.Ride Connection in Portland, Oregon has good programs to attract these residents. (NCST's website has a description of their Ride Board program.) There may be other models for other communities to use in their planning.
Comments (3)
I agree this is a greatly underutilized resource. In central NJ, there are many adult communities who use their own buses for group trips but one of our challenges has been getting them to use their bus to bring people from within their community to centralized bus stops that serve the clubhouse or the edge of these communities. There is a need nationally to get organizations that operate vehicles to use them in coordination with community transit services.
Steve,
I agree there is a national need. We (CTAA) are working on it; LeadingAGE is interested; NCST staff is interested, and if we look we can probably find a number of places where people have tried successfully/unsuccessfully to do something. This online dialog can be an important step in starting to get a national effort underway to encourage and promote more coordination.
Key is a common base of accounting (so both parties are comfortable they are getting a fare deal) and risk management - to assure the driver and vehicle insurance liability carry and driver training isn't an issue. These often look like mountains - but can become small hills. United We Ride and CTAA have resources to assist. Great idea, Jane!