I hope the MBTA considers a partnership with private firms/Uber for The Ride. $45 per trip is steep.
The Ride's On-demand Paratransit lets you use Uber/Lyft/etc. optionally on a pilot program that's slated to run for 1 more month unless the FCMB extends it. It comes with a standard disclaimer that while a Ride consumer can opt for this alternative, there is
no guarantee of ADA services on the trip. Accessibility assistance still requires the traditional Ride. Therefore, it's a lot different from an "outsource" of the core Ride service.
There are *potential* avenues for Ride privatization, provided the bidders survive all scrutiny on what service they're supposed to provide (no guarantees of success there). But keep in mind that paratransit by definition is an accessibility service, and by
legal definition falls under ADA regulation--Title 49 CFR 37.131--with significant government oversight and GAO data collection on individual compliance. The T is required to make available paratransit service that offers full accessibility assistance as a default. Anything different like the On-Demand program is totally opt-in, while the default full-accessible service must be offered as the primary/opt-out. It's a loss leader by-design that's supposed to carry a higher-premium subsidy than regular transit because it's so much more needs-intensive than regular transit service.
Now, the federal government should be chucking in heaps more assistance than it is for being the one to impose that mandatory overhead, but it's been affirmed many times over by letter and spirit of the law that this is an essential accessibility service so the existence of a highish subsidy is no longer controversial. Whether the T is running an efficient ship by 'Paratransit Land' standards is a fully valid question requiring fully valid comparison to other paratransit systems. But any which way it's going to be some premium over other forms of transit...and certainly over ride share services...because that's basic nature of the beast. Those other types simply do not have the extra regulatory bulk and compliance hurdles that come with being so very narrowly-focused on special-needs accessibility.
For that reason Uber's whole business model is incompatible with taking on a contract like a standard Ride service. Nor can the T flip the paradigm on its head for the bidding and make the current On-demand the new primary/opt-out and full accessibility the new opt-in, because that would be immediately illegal. Uber crowd-sources vehicles; short of reversing course and developing a whole procurement supply chain from scratch they can't guarantee pickups in an ADA-compliant vehicle. They don't train their drivers in letter-of-law accessibility services and assistance; a distance-learning course by app isn't going to verify skill/rule retention like a paratransit driver who has to pass and/or periodically recertify some sort of live employee training before taking revenue clients. And with how little give the regs offer, Uber's hands-off oversight model can't deliver a 99% accessibility compliance reportable to the government. They have a checkered enough history of vetting their drivers as-is, but it's also a business model that nets its lower free market price through explicitly lower overall oversight and higher tolerance for mistakes (i.e. "don't want to pay the medallion and union premium every time?...be willing to put up with +1 higher rate of lousy trips and you'll save the rest of the time.") That's fundamentally incompatible with the
higher legally-mandated oversight of paratransit, and also risks a contractor like the T seeing all its projected savings go up in smoke--and then some--by fines racked up for accessibility shortfalls, and the
incident rate at which they're getting flagged for fines. It's almost certainly a fiscal disaster in the making.
I think if you're looking for standard Ride bidders it's going to be much more the Paul Revere Transportation types who already have that in-house capability. It's not a large list of potential bidders, and is pretty much companies (like Paul Revere) the T already does contracting business with. The reason there aren't a lot of examples of successfully outsourced paratransit systems is that the only way for a for-profit bidder to make a buck is if the contract shields them from most of the extra overhead. So the potential bidding pool is cut way down, and a lot of transit agencies who'd otherwise love to get out from under that premium don't end up seeing the savings when they crunch the numbers on what they'd have to eat in an RFP. If this weren't the case, you'd see a lot of huge companies (Keolis, for one) that gobble up midsize-city municipal bus operator contracts go binge-bidding for the paratransit deals, too.
Nature of the beast being an accessibility service, as much as I'm sure that gives Charlie Chieppo at Pioneer Institute a frowny face. The ADA never did pussyfoot about costs as a reason for not implementing accessibility service. While it would be nicer if the feds did more of their share when they saddle the states with these cost burdens, it is what it is. And if the On-Demand Paratransit program is extended or deepened, the likes of Uber are still going to be relegated to bit players done on voluntary customer waiving of any right to accessibility services. It'll primarily grow by popularity from riders who deliberately want it to opt-into it (i.e. "options = good"). But because of what they're mandated to provide under the ADA as a baseline, the T can't do much deliberate or suggestive by its own hand to redirect riders to the On-Demand option as means of weaning themselves a little bit off the standard Ride subsidy.
