Every paratransit team has them: the sticky note taped to the monitor, the spreadsheet only your eligibility manager understands, the one field everyone has quietly agreed means something it wasn't designed to mean.
In this webinar, Rachel Birnbaum, VP of Enablement at Via and a former paratransit general manager and dispatcher, and Koen Wies, Senior Product Manager, walked through five real workarounds they've encountered during software transitions — and how a productized solution ended up saving valuable resources for agencies.
1. All-caps rider names: mobility needs stored in the formatting, not the data
Size does matter when it comes to vehicle capacity, and too often agencies have to rely on putting rider names typed entirely in capitals to flag an oversized wheelchair or scooter. It's a good instinct — fast to spot, visually large. But the scheduler now knows something the software doesn't, which means trips need to be manually scheduled and reporting misses important details.
The fix: Customizable fields for mobility requirements and flexible vehicle capacity allow you to dictate exactly the type of space your rider needs and the vehicles that can accommodate them, accounting for the other riders on board. Set the parameters once, and automatic scheduling ensures that your rider will always be matched to a vehicle with the right-sized available space.
2. Eligibility dates in the notes field: enforceable rules buried in free text
When eligibility mistakes happen, whether it's a rider with temporary eligibility who has somehow slipped through the cracks, or a rider with critical needs for paratransit access who missed a renewal date, it has real costs. Without an automated eligibility solution, many agencies are stuck with no better option than writing a rider's eligibility expiration date as a free-text comment on their profile. While that’s a hack that’s easy to add and easy to edit, it creates a system that is 100% manual to enforce — error-prone and invisible to reporting.
The fix: Structured eligibility periods that are coded into the rider’s profile. These dates can then be used to enforce service rules automatically; generating renewal warning letters before expiration, and automatically preventing riders who are expired from riding.
3. Mad Libs approval letters: eligibility correspondence assembled by hand
One eligibility team, fed up with mail merges, turned their approval letter into a fill-in-the-blank form, printed the blanks in bulk, typed rider details into a spreadsheet each week, printed those onto Avery labels, and stuck them into the letters. While it may be a fun weekly craft project, it’s time consuming and labor intensive for a team who would rather be spending their time on helping riders.
The fix: Automated letter generation inside the eligibility workflow, allows each agency to create custom templates and fields that will automatically pull in the relevant rider details and bulk generate letters. Just click, print, and send by email or mail.
4. Taped-up reminders: pickup knowledge that lives in one person's head
We’ve all seen those post-it notes on the reservationist's desk reminding them of those tricky locations around the city. It works until a new hire who hasn't memorized what these locations mean joins — then you get a trip booked to the wrong entrance at the hospital, or the opposite end of the mall. These mistakes end up in no-shows, or long dwell times as the driver hunts for their rider, resulting in lateness that cascades throughout the manifest.
The fix: Special locations with precise pickup and drop-off points for hospitals, campuses, shopping complexes, and airports. Agents are prompted to book to specific entrances, meaning the driver is always going to where the rider needs.
5. The hourly phone alarm: overflow trips that can't be queued in advance
A team told Rachel that sending trips to their overflow taxi providers was easy. Then, sitting in their dispatch office, she noticed an alarm going off on a dispatcher's phone every hour — a reminder to send that hour's batch, because their system wouldn't let them queue anything ahead. It's a manual task that interrupts every hour and is easy to miss.
The fix: Overflow built into your scheduling suite, with recommendations helping dispatch see which trips are eligible based on capacity, service zones, and rider preferences. Integrations with Uber, Lyft, UZURV, and iCabbi return driver, vehicle, and ETA to the same screen — and trips can be queued days ahead.
While each of these represents a resourceful way to keep things running, they all come down to a person holding information that should be the responsibility of a smart paratransit software system. We’re delighted to be out in the field and learning from our partners so that we can continuously evolve our product to solve these hacks.
Help us build the next generation of features: send us your team’s most delightful (or painful) workarounds at via-enablement@ridewithvia.com!
