Directions & trends

Chris Zeilinger, assistant director,
Governmental Affairs - CTAA

One of the triumphs of transit in rural areas, small cities, and other communities is that inclusive, effective coordination is a long-standing fact of life in these places. From the very first days of rural public transit demonstration programs in the 1970s, planners, providers and officials all recognized that there had to be effective, community-based partnerships to make these programs work. Immediately upon its establishment in 1979, the small transit program of grants for elderly and disabled persons' transportation, currently called Sec. 5310, became the central source of capital assistance for senior services and local disability-related programs all across the country, drawing on the resources of the Older Americans Act and various disability services grant programs for operating support.

Confronting the disincentives of coordination
In addition to the discomfort that organizations may feel when they are asked to unveil all the hidden costs behind their transportation programs, there are several other profound disincentives to coordinating a community's transportation network. Foremost is that most federal and state funding streams simply do not reward program efficiencies; this can be particularly problematic in formula-based programs, where grantees - and communities - are likely to lose money if they start providing more service with fewer, but better coordinated, dollars. Another potential pitfall rests in those programs where volunteers or staff members are reimbursed for automobile mileage. Such reimbursements are not supposed to be a profit-sharing enterprise, but we hear from dozens of volunteer transportation programs across the country whose participants candidly admit they are "in it for the money." And, of course, there are other, well-understood, disincentives, such as the loss of autonomy when resources are shared among partners, perceptions that quality of personalized services are somehow compromised, and the simple fact that most bureaucratic processes make it so much easier not to coordinate services than to try and harmonize oft-conflicting program requirements and expectations.

Facing the challenges that don't go away
Community transportation providers have been working hard to coordinate services for decades. Some gratitude should be expressed to the Coordinating Council for Access and Mobility, which was formed out of a 1986 agreement between the U.S. Dept. of Transportation and the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS). Immediately upon its creation, this council proceeded with all due procedural speed to identify the federal barriers to coordinating federal human services programs with the transportation programs essential to their mission. One by one, those federal issues that could be resolved between the departments were overcome, so that by the 1990s, HHS staff could attest, truthfully, that all surmountable federal barriers had been addressed.

However, the federal departments and their coordinating council could not solve two of the greatest problems facing communities' coordinated transportation efforts. One of these is insurance, which once again has entered a period where transportation efforts are hampered by the costs, conditions and availability of commercial insurance. The federal government is powerless to help, because the insurance market is governed almost entirely by states' laws and agencies.

The other leading challenge that is beyond federal agencies' ability to help is that of trying to provide transportation services that cross local jurisdictional boundaries, such as city and county lines. These jurisdictional issues often are purely local in nature, so that even state agencies may have a limited chance to improve the coordination of efforts. However, one area where states could help is in conveying accurate, reliable information about their own jurisdictional requirements; we frequently hear of coordination barriers purportedly based on state statutes that turn out to be either fictitious or misunderstood. Meanwhile, on the federal level, the U.S. Dept. of Transportation is beginning to recognize the need to improve coordination between its own Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and the FTA.

The willingness to share and learn
As mentioned earlier in this article, rural and community-based transit has a long history of coordination and partnership. What we are seeing is that many of the trends, issues, and challenges that are confronting our colleagues in larger urban areas are those that rural and small-city America's transit programs addressed years ago. Now that the Federal Transit Administration has breathed new life into its awareness and support for this sort of coordination, the time should be right for our lessons and successes in areas such as cost-effective demand-response transit, co-mingling of diverse passenger groups on shared vehicles, shared ownership and operation of transit assets, customer- and service-focused applications of technology, and more, to be shared with our colleagues in the suburbs and larger cities. They may resist at first, but they already are starting to appreciate the knowledge and skills we have to offer.