January was a bad month for Mary Maxwell. As a bus driver for TriMet’s LIFT program, which serves disabled patrons who can’t access regular transit, Maxwell had suffered through days of sexual harassment from the same passenger. Even after she filed several complaints, Maxwell says her bosses wouldn’t do anything about it. This stress was compounded by the fact Maxwell wasn’t allowed regularly scheduled breaks from her job—her grueling schedule kept her in the driver’s seat for hours without a chance to use the bathroom or seek respite from abusive clientele. The pressure built until, one afternoon, she soiled herself on the driver’s seat. It happened the next day too, and on the third day, she couldn’t take it anymore.
“Quitting was literally the only way I could get back my dignity,” Maxwell says.
Maxwell isn’t the only LIFT driver who’s felt disrespected at her job, which has her shuttling passengers for pre-scheduled trips around the city. At a recent meeting of the Portland Jobs with Justice-affiliated Workers Rights Board (WRB), several LIFT employees and passengers shared their own experiences with LIFT, a TriMet service that has been operated by a subcontractor called First Transit since 2007. Their concerns ranged from unclear scheduling and mismanagement to unsanitary working conditions and unreasonably long wait times for riders. According to WRB Chair Johanna Brenner, TriMet must “establish clear standards for paratransit service and must hold First Transit accountable for meeting these standards.” And if improvements haven’t been made by the time the First Transit contract is up for renegotiation in the next year, WRB says it’s time for TriMet to run LIFT on its own.
LIFT riders are required to call in their reservations by 5 pm the previous day with departure and destination addresses, and drivers pick up and drop off numerous riders around the city throughout the day. There are usually multiple passengers on a LIFT bus at a time.
“We often have a bus full of people who legally cannot be left alone,” said driver Karen Kreutzer, explaining why she can’t take bathroom breaks. Scheduled breaks are often set only at the beginning of an hours-long shift. “I’m talking about holding it for four hours or longer,” Kreutzer said. “It’s hard to pay attention to the road.” LIFT passenger Nico Serra agreed. “For a handful of years I used TriMet LIFT, but I stopped using it because being on the bus is so physically demanding,” he said. “I’ve been stuck on TriMet [LIFT] buses for over four hours on some occasions.” Serra, who uses a wheelchair, said that LIFT consistently made him late for doctor appointments. “I’ve heard about personal care assistants having to medicate their wards before putting them on LIFT buses because the conditions are so difficult,” he said.
These indignities may amount to a civil rights violation. Attorney Barbara Diamond, a WRB member, says that as LIFT operates today, it doesn’t fulfill the minimum requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). “This system as it’s being carried out deprives the community of the input and active participation of people with disabilities, which is what the law is supposed to address,” she says.
TriMet and First Transit representatives dispute their employees’ allegations of mistreatment. TriMet spokesperson Tia York even said that because LIFT riders don’t operate fixed routes, they “enjoy greater flexibility to access adequate facilities.” TriMet did not go into further details regarding other problems after being sent the WRB’s recommendations.
According to drivers, they didn’t have the same difficulties under the previous contractor, which was acquired by First Transit in 2007. And First Transit doesn’t have the best track record on these issues—the company has been the subject of more than 50 complaints in the tri-county area to Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries since 1998.
Other local transit systems, like C-Tran in Vancouver, have avoided these problems with their paratransit services by not working with subcontractors. Jill Carillo, a driver for C-Van, Vancouver’s LIFT equivalent, says the differences between her service and TriMet are “night and day.” According to Carillo, drivers for the city-run service get more than double the amount of training as TriMet LIFT drivers, transport twice the number of passengers per hour, and are able to use the bathroom when necessary.
“We ensure that people with disabilities in our region can actually get around and live their lives,” Carillo says. Though it costs a bit more to have the services run by C-Tran instead of a contractor, Carillo adds, “It’s absolutely worth the expense.”
Testimony at the WRB meeting indicated that many of these problems at LIFT are caused by lack of training, limited driver knowledge of their routes ahead of time, and general mismanagement.
The WRB is expected to write a report based on the meeting by the end of June, which can then be used to draw more attention to the problem. Until then, drivers will keep the pressure on First Transit—they’re even considering a strike.
According to passengers, LIFT’s systemic issues have prevented riders from getting a job, going to school, or socializing. Serra says the lack of accessibility means “we have small lives that are difficult, and they don’t need to be.”
The federal government needs to get involved. I was a paratransit user when I lived in upstate NY. I now live on the Oregon coast with my retired mom, so I no longer use paratransit – though in the future we both may need to use it when she can no longer drive.
The CDTA paratransit system in the Capital Region was investigated on numerous occasions by the federal government for violating terms. See, the federal government pays and pays a lot for paratransit. Tri-Met and whoever they’ve subcontracted their paratransit system to are making bank in federal funds. CDTA didn’t clean up its act until the federal government got involved and even then it wasn’t great. I spent more of my life (8 years living in the Capital Region after becoming physically disabled before my mother retired) scheduling paratransit, waiting for paratransit, and filing complaints about paratransit.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990) is federal legislation that requires any municipality that has public transportation to provide paratransit, aka public transportation, to its disabled population. The only way these programs get cleaned up when they are being run improperly is to have the federal government get involved and if they don’t clean up their act, the funding is pulled (and the money is what will force them to do “right” as they live for that money, trust me).
Paratransit is rough. As a disabled person I saw drivers treated terribly (not able to take bathroom or meal breaks, unreasonable number of pickups and drop offs that made it completely impossible to get anywhere on-time, and overflow due to demand given to shitty taxi cab companies that didn’t have the proper vehicles or drivers trained to be working with the physically and developmentally disabled population they were serving. OH BUT THEY TOOK THE MONEY, THE TOOK THAT MONEY AND USED AS LITTLE AS POSSIBLE TO RUN THE PARATRANSIT SYSTEM WHILE POCKETING THE REST.
As a disabled person who needed to rely on paratransit to get to doctor appointments or to go anywhere at all, I had to schedule every trip 24 hours in advance (more if possible), could not reschedule times (though trips could be cancelled), had to wait and wait and wait and wait. Customers were required to wait 30 minutes before being able to call and say the pickup was late. I would schedule pickups hours prior to my scheduled appointments and still arrive late – so often that my mother had to take time off from work to drive me to my doctor appointments b/c paratransit was so unreliable. I can’t imagine being one of the people who relied on paratransit to get to and from a job. And sometimes you would be on the bus or in the cab for HOURS. Which when you are disabled, depending on your disability, can be extremely difficult to nearly impossible.
Nothing will change unless the federal government gets involved. Period. Good luck to the drivers and passengers. I know how awful it can be and I feel for each and every one of you.
A couple of years ago, during daylight hours , I watched a ‘regular’ trimet bus drive off as a man in a wheel chair was frantically wheeling toward the bus, clearly he was trying to catch it. It was the stop near starbucks near NW 21st. and Lovejoy. I tweeted at TriMet about the incident. There were several other onlooking bystanders who were also clearly shocked by the bus driver’s choice to acknowledge the man in the wheel chair, only to drive off without waiting. Never got a reply from Trimet. I don’t know what happens to abandoned, not deleted, twitter accounts. I assumed Trimet didn’t reply to Hispanic tweeters.