Measuring the Success of Improved Coordination of Human Service Transportation Systems

For many older adults, lower income individuals and persons with disabilities, meeting the mobility needs has been challenging. Fortunately there are more than 60 federal programs that fund human service transportation to individuals with lower incomes, older adults and people with disabilities. Unfortunately most of these programs operate independently from one another and consequently result in fragmented, duplicative and unreliable services. To address the growing concerns over rising human service transportation costs and to provide better service, the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) launched two major initiatives: the United We Ride (UWR) initiative, driven by the Federal Coordinating Council on Access and Mobility (CCAM), and the Mobility Services for All Americans (MSAA) initiative that focuses on the application of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) technologies to support service delivery. These two initiatives have collaborated closely and built on each other's efforts and successes in advancing human service transportation. In this paper, the authors first introduce the development of the Framework for ACTION document, a new tool targeting local communities and states for building shared understanding and action for moving forward together with respect to human service transportation coordination, followed by detailed descriptions of the six core elements within the Framework for ACTION. Then, the authors discuss the UWR/MSAA joint demonstration program and explain how the Framework for ACTION core elements are represented in the proposal evaluation criteria. Finally, the authors analyze the differences in average scores between the selected and non-selected proposals with respect to the Framework for ACTION elements. The results suggest that the selected project sites are clearly and consistently more advanced than their non-selected peers in terms of moving toward a coordinated human service transportation system.