Do MATA’s plans for the future include people with disabilities?

Help make MATA accountable

By Allison Donald
Innovate Memphis and the Transit and Demand Committee are working to include the disability community in the conversation on the future of transportation in Memphis.  MATAplus riders still have to deal with the uncertainty of leadership and continued inconsistent service while plans are being made to improve the system.

In a thirty-five minute podcast interview with Ryan Poe reporter from the Commercial Appeal new MATA CEO Gary Rosenfeld spoke about the current state of public transit in Memphis.  He also talked openly about his priorities and choices that have to be considered in order to improve the system as a whole.  He did not mention any improvements he saw for MATAplus in terms of on time performance, improving the phone system or training staff to interact with people with disabilities on both the regular fixed route side and MATAplus.

Under Rosenfeld’s leadership MATA has been working to become a transit system that is desirable to use instead of one that is seen as a last choice by its riders.  Over a span of a year and a half the on-time performance has improved from the mid-forties percent of rides on-time to the mid-seventies.  He is also working to continue to upgrade the fleet.  

If the improvement with on-time performance continues and the expansion of the fleet goes as planned, then more access to employment opportunities will be available to people in the city.  He also discussed the ongoing plans to get the trolleys running again.  MATA still plans to have the trolleys running again by the end of the year and the main priority during these test runs have been safety.

Rosenfeld talked about what a community values in regards to public transit. 

“It is a matter of coverage versus frequency,” said Gary Rosenfeld, “Do you want to wait where you are and have the bus come once an hour or do you want to walk fifteen minutes and have the bus come every fifteen minutes?” 

These are the questions that are being asked and answered as part of the transit vision exercise will affect people with disabilities and how we use public transit both MATA fixed-route and MATAplus. 

After listening to the interview initially I was upset that he did not make an effort to include the improvement of service of MATAplus in his overall vision for a functioning transit system.  As a person with a disability who wants to use public transit around the Memphis instead of MATAplus. 

In other cities that I travel, I am able to use the fixed-route system rather than paratransit. The differences that I have seen here in Memphis are that the community of people with disabilities are informed about the issue of transportation and are more persistent about what they will and won’t accept. 

It is up to us to hold MATA accountable and to voice our opinion during this process. It is time to be a part of the change we want to see and one way we can do that as a community is by clicking on the link below and taking this five minute survey about what we value in transportation and what improvements we would like to see.  

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MemphisTransitVision1.