A Metro Board committee Thursday approved more than $6 million in improvements, including door-to-door service, for MetroAccess.
The one-time federal funding, gained through the Job Access and Reverse Grant Program, will be used to purchase 67 vehicles for the transit program for the elderly and disabled, said Steven Yaffe, head of Metro’s Community Transportation Services division.
The funding also will be used to purchase larger vehicles to form partnerships with local services, such as senior centers, and coordinate more trips, Yaffe said. Money will be spent on hiring consultants to come up with more ideas to improve the service and better scheduling practices, he said.
The improvements should reduce wait time from 10 to five minutes, “reduce complaints, reduce mistakes and reduce late trips” on the service whose ridership has grown more than 6 percent in the last year, he said.
The vehicles will be added to the fleet of 450 MetroAccess vehicles, which includes more than 80 vehicles contracted from other companies.
“The biggest thing we are doing here is introducing door-to-door service as opposed to curb-to-curb,” said Dana Kauffman, a Virginia representative on the board. He added, “Before there was this miraculous assumption that folks with disabilities could somehow get to the curb — and I think that we found that faith-based transit wasn’t working.”
Jim Graham, a District representative on the board, requested an analysis of the long-term operating costs the one-time funding won’t cover before the full Board of Directors votes on the measure next week.
Metro staff said additional capital costs should be covered by increases in ridership.
