About
King County paratransit is a vital form of transportation for people with disabilities. The Access buses that are a part of King County’s paratransit fleet take passengers anywhere that a Metro bus, Seattle streetcar or Sound Transit rail service would travel. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that when fixed-route service is not a feasible option for a passenger, they should be offered a paratransit option, like the Access buses. Unlike fixed-route services, the Access buses have schedules and pick-up and drop-off points that change daily based upon customer requests which are scheduled at least one day in advance and up to seven days in advance of the requested ride. Scheduling these requests and setting the routes a day in advance limits the flexibility of a bus route on a given day. This makes disaster recovery (bus breakdown, late bus, etc.) especially difficult and potentially very costly since all requests must be fulfilled for a given route as per ADA regulations. Our team’s main goal for the summer is to provide King County with a more optimized solution to deal with the problem of rerouting in the event of a broken or late bus. We hope to provide this solution in the form of a simple web interface that dispatchers can use to return the options, in order of cost, for a large number of unhandled requests. Part of identifying which routes are capable of taking on unhandled requests in the least costly way is creating a metric for classifying rides that are particularly inefficient. Within the realm of transit these are referred to as “Ugly Rides.”