Has anyone in the Boston area heard of or used this service?

[kestrell]

It's called Circulation
https://www.circulation.com/
and it claims to work with hospitals and health plans in order to provide transportation specifically tailored to the needs of a patient or PWD.

Comments

[siderea]

You say yes, but then say something that doesn't actually agree with what I said. How is providing PWD rides for free exploiting them?

Kes, this whole line of inquiry has struck me as weird. There's nothing about the shittiness of paratransit that is in the least bit mysterious to me. Do you not realize what the politics and business model of public transit is, and consequently how utterly at odds with that paratransit is? Like, catastrophically so?

In the US, all public transit systems are politically beseiged, and inadequately funded to begin with: transit crosses municipal and county lines so must be run at the state level, but the cities transit serves are surrounded by countryside they don't and that rest of the state doesn't feel like paying for transit only the city-slickers get. And since all transit is subsidized - because transit doesn't have an adequate business model to be run at a profit, it has to be - they strangle the funding as best they can in the legislature.

In the face of that hostility, the only thing that keeps the wheels on the buses is leveraging the heck out of the basic economies of scale at the heart of public transit: a busload of passengers per bus run splits the cost of the run to a low enough cost-per-capita to plausibly run in the black - or at least not ruinously in the red - at the price per ride the bus can charge and still get passengers.

Obviously, paratransit flies right in the face of that. Paratransit is astronomically expensive to provide. The numbers simply don't work. If transporting a rider to an appointment and back entails that the driver drive 15 min to the rider, 15 min to the appointment, and 15 min from the appointment, that is 45 minutes of driver time, just for one appointment. Well, the minimum wage is $12/hr. Just the cost of the driver's labor - not the expense of operating the vehicle, not his wage for his federally mandated breaks, not the cost of unemployment and workers comp insurances for him, not the cut to operate dispatch - is $9 for that 15 minute away appointment.

Add in disablism and classism (public transit is widely seen as charity for poor people, who are in the US assumed to be fuckups exploiting their responsible neighbors) disinclining the public to want to adequately fund it out of public money, and it really, really isn't mysterious why paratransit sucks.

[kestrell]

Apologies for not understanding your original point: I'm dealing with some health issues that are really stealing my brain energy, and my leftover brain spoons are going toward projects I'm trying to finish.

Yes, I also often fail to understand big politically treacherous issues like the para-transit programs. I've only just begun trying to grasp the various conflicting agendas involved and I'm still handicapped by taking at face value and believing people who work for public programs and insist that they are trying to fix the problems.

[cvirtue]

The individual workers may well be operating on good faith, but they've been dealt a terrible hand by people upstream.

Based on what Siderea said, it's likely that the way to fix these problems cannot be done directly at the local level, no matter how willing the people on the ground are, and the only solution is more money from above.

[kestrell]

I disagree: I think before some of those changes can be made, a lot of people need to become aware and informed about how the system is broken, and what is *not* being done to fix it. Every single person with a disability knows, probably better than any other group on the committee, hwo broken this is, but we participate in the conversation anyway because many of the people who are not disabled themselves are beginning to find out how broken the system is.

Additionally, this is what we do: we initiate conversations and try to keep them open. Perhaps this incarnation of this particular group won't manage to make a lot of changes, a point of view which I think is already being disproven, but we are all making connections, refining ideas and arguments, and planting seeds in the minds of many people.

So I'll do this until this particular incarnation of this particular committee comes to an end, or I burn out, and then someone else will pick up the torch for awhile.

But sitting around diagnosing how something isn't working and then telling other people they can't fix it: that is not my style.

[cvirtue]

I hope you are correct -- you certainly know more about it than I do.

[kestrell]

Also, I know this opinion will be unpopular, but why do you believe Siderea knows everything there is to know on this subject?

[cvirtue]

I don't think she does, but she's written about this before, and is another person who knows more about it than I do.