Palm Tran Seeks To Change Guidelines During COVID-19 Pandemic
By Alec Halberstadt
The Board of County Commissioners held a meeting on October 20 to discuss a range of topics including changes to the Palm Tran connection eligibility and reservation process to try to improve their on time performance (OTP) and attempt keep people safe during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Clinton Forbes, Executive Director of Palm Tran, went to the board seeking approval for a number of changes to the eligibility and reservation processes of Palm Tran, such as holding over the phone interviews rather than in person, educating applicants on all transport options in the county, screen applicants on based on mobility limitations, and creating an appeal process for denied eligible riders. He also sought to reduce the reservation window from seven days to three days.
“As a result of Covid there is less ridership,” Clinton said. “There’s less demand on the service because people aren’t riding. We went from 4,000 people per day riding the system to 2,000.”
The Covid-19 virus has cut the number of daily riders in half for the Palm Tran and in doing so has resulted in OTP rising significantly.
Clinton does believe ridership of the Palm Tran will come back as more pharmaceuticals and a vaccine for Covid-19 become more easily available, and he notes that there has been an uptick in riders recently.
Vice Mayor Robert Weinroth was adamant about ensuring people that applied for the Palm Tran service were taken to the interview process as quickly and as safely as possible.
“The sooner we can start implementing that, especially since these are people who are asking for the ability to use this, they should be able to use the service to access the location where an interview can take place to ensure that, again, they are a person that can be afforded this service,” He said.
Vice Mayor Weinroth also found it “appropriate” to reduce the reservation time to the industry standard of three days. He also suggested to call the day or night before “like with doctor appointments” to further cut down on no shows.
Clinton noted that 24% of reservations for Palm Tran are no shows for their scheduled reservation.
Commissioner Valeche asked about the potential of HIPAA laws being violated by the possibility of asking personal medical questions over a telephone interview.
The Palm Tran directors stated that while the nature of the medical information they are seeking may be more personal in certain cases HIPAA laws do not apply specifically to transit. All the information shared with them is also stored in a secure file, so it is under the same protections.
The directors also mentioned that the new process would require less medically sensitive information as to “reduce the footprint” and they are only looking for specific information.
A question posed by Commissioner Weiss was how the change in reservation time from seven days to three days may effect people who have a reoccurring trip and if there was anything they would need to do or if those trips would be affected.
Executive Director Forbes noted that many trips are reoccurring reservation trips and that those trips are already saved in the system, so there is going to be no changes to those trips. “They know where they’re going and those won’t be effected,” he said.
Tomas Boiton, founder of the nonprofit “Citizens for Improved Transit,” suggested during the public comments that rather than do a telephone call for new applicants it should be a video conference. It would allow them to have an image of the applicant for the file and it would save the county money as they would not have to send a Palm Tran bus to take the person to the interview.
The board approved the changes in guidelines for Palm Tran unanimously.
