Cuts to Utah paratransit causing riders to get lost

From The Salt Lake Tribune:

Sometimes, what you fear happening the most will happen. So it was with Jan Brown and her son, Beau, who uses Utah Transit Authority's paratransit buses to get from his home to an activities center and back again.

Last week, Jan told me how worried she was about the system's new routing system and its variable pickup and drop-off times.

On May 3, Jan couldn't find Beau for nearly an hour. And, she said, it was hard to reach anyone at UTA by phone for help.

Beau, 25, has Down syndrome and Type I diabetes and lives with his parents in Sandy. Monday morning, he got safely on the bus at a park-and-ride at 9400 South and 2000 East, about a mile from his home.

That afternoon, UTA told Jan he'd be dropped off at 4:30 p.m., so she left work at 4 p.m. to pick him up. She arrived at the drop-off at 4:35, she said, and Beau wasn't there.

So she called UTA and was put on hold, not once, but twice. Finally, Jan says, a woman told her to "chill out" and to pick up Beau at a TRAX station at 9000 South.

Jan drove there -- no Beau. She called UTA's call center again, but it was closed. She pressed 1 for an emergency line, and was put on hold.

Finally a minivan pulled up with Beau aboard. The driver wanted to know how Jan had gotten the 4:30 pick-up time.

"I just lost it," she said. "I'm surprised I wasn't on the 5 o'clock news."

Jan, who's researched other city's paratransit systems, told someone at UTA that those systems could leave a parent an automated call with a 10-minute warning of a drop-off time. She says the woman told her UTA's phone system could do it with an upgrade, but there was no money for that.

Then, Jan said, the woman suggested Jan hold a fundraiser. "What, I'm supposed to have a bake sale for UTA?" she told me.

Beau, who is a sweet, quiet guy, has been going to the Lifelong Learning Center in South Salt Lake for two years. "He's never been happier," Jan told me last week.

Now, he "doesn't want to go to Lifelong, and he doesn't want to ride the bus," she said.

After I talked to Jan on Wednesday, I called UTA spokesman Gerry Carpenter, who described Monday's incident as a "miscommunication and an unfortunate incident."

Now, UTA has been hit with budget shortfalls that have made changes in paratransit and its other systems painfully necessary. Even so, Carpenter said, "We do our best.

"Our goal is customer service," he said. "Our staff and drivers are compassionate" people who know how vulnerable passengers like Beau can be.

Given that the new routes just went into effect Sunday, "things are going to happen. It's a rough situation," he said. "Our hearts go out to Jan, and we'll do our best to do it better."

Jan and her husband both work -- she told me she does it for a pension and to insure herself and her son -- and they'll keep using paratransit for now. But they'll document everything that happens, and keep in touch with the 70 or 80 other families in similar situations. And contact their legislators, maybe even the governor.

As Jan put it, "It's not just Beau."