PLEASE DON'T MENTION MICROTRANSIT.

• Author: Ervin, Mike
• Position: Paratransit and the future of public transportation

Door-to-door public transportation: Just imagine what that would be like, if you dare.

Instead of trudging to a nearby bus stop or train platform, getting off at the closest point to your destination, and trudging some more, you could just summon a ride by phone or an app to pick you up at your current location and take you to where you need to go. Then a public transit vehicle would be dispatched to do just that.

Doesn't that sound wonderful? It seems like it should be the wave of the future. In fact, some public transit agencies in the United States are already giving door-to-door transportation a try.

In 2019, a microtransit pilot project was launched in a limited area in Bakersfield, California. Then, late last year, the board of directors of the Golden Empire Transit District decided that microtransit was so popular and successful that they voted to expand it to all of metropolitan Bakersfield.

In January, the North Carolina Department of Transportation announced that it had received $10.4 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation, through the Rural Surface Transportation grant program, to further develop microtransit systems in five largely rural counties.

Last July, the city council of Norman, Oklahoma, allocated $750,000 to conduct a one-year pilot program to try out door-to-door service in a limited area of the city during hours when the fixed-route service is not operational.

This all seems like it could be a good way to serve rural people, who are beyond the reach of fixed-route transportation systems, and low-wage urban workers who have trouble commuting to and from their jobs during hours when there is no fixed-route service.

But my experience riding door-to-door public transit has left me traumatized to this day. In fact, I found it to be so arrogantly inferior to mainline service that I stopped using it thirty years ago.

Before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in 1990, public transportation was not required to be accessible to disabled folks. Thus, none of the buses in the Chicago Transit Authority's (CTA) fleet were accessible to wheelchair users like me. It was like living in a large city that had no public transportation at all.

In the early 1980s, the CTA rolled out a door-to-door service for disabled folks who were unable to access the mainline system. To participate, I first had to establish my eligibility by submitting to the CTA a note from my doctor solemnly swearing that I...