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Transportation of SRA Participants ... Good News or Bad News? By Robert A. Foster As much as SRA's try to mirror themselves after park districts, one area they cannot duplicate is in the area of transportation. Due in part to the geographical layout of our areas (our partner districs include the Berwyn Park District, Clyde Park District, Hawthorne Park District, Park District of Oak Park, Park District of Forest Park, Central Stickney Park District North Berwyn Park District, Franklin Park Park District, Westdale Park District, River Forest Park District and the Village of Elmwood Park) and due to the disabilities of our participants, transportation is oftentimes a necessary provision for a number of reasons: 1) Our participants can't drive; 2) There is no public accessible transportation in the area; 3) A child with a disability cannot go to the local Recreation Center on his or her own. West Suburban Special Recreation Association (WSSRA) provided transportation from its beginning, when the Park District of Oak Park and the River Forest Park District were the only 2 member districts. Back then, the majority of participants were children and could be driven to after-school programs by the same carrier that transporated them home from their special education classes. WSSRA had no vehicles of their own and very few adult participants. As WSSR grew into other communities, the transportation company would not transport into certain areas. As a result, WSSRA could not transport all of their children. Also, more physically handicapped adults were staying in the community (instead of at a hospital or nursing home). WSSRA tried to transport them through a local cab company that operated an accessible van. This attempt didn't work for a number of reasons: 1) No control of the service: safety, breakdowns, tardiness; 2) Expense each pick up per person was $25.00 each way plus $1.00 per mile, so a trip to downtown Chicago for 3 persons would be $180.00 per night, 3) We outgrew the service within a short while. (Continued on page 32)
Transportation ...
Each of our adult programs may have 6-11 persons requiring transportation. Our solution to this problem was to provide our own transportation. In 1985, with an advance from the Park District of Oak Park, we purchased 3 vans, hired 3 drivers and we were on our way. We offer door-to-door rides for $1.25 each way and pick-up points for $1.00 per day. We are able to put together our own schedules for pick-up times, plan trips to a variety of interesting places and with the part-time drivers, we are able to keep our recreation staff working at programs and not driving our vans, or coordinating transportation. This has proven to be very beneficial for a number of reasons: 1) The drivers we hire are experienced and have all taken some sort of driving class, such as truck driving school or Illinois School Bus Driver Training Course. 2) Recreation staff driving for 11/2 hours and then running an efficient, enthusiastic program is a lot to expect, plus, they still have to drive the participants home again, leading into a fatigue factor. 3) Recreation staff just don't want to drive. It's definitely not why they went to college and it eats into valuable time they could be spending on something else. In 1988 WSSRA provided over 21,000 (Continued next page)
Transportation ...
rides to our participants. We did so with 4 vans (2 wheelchair accessible) and our 3 part-time drivers. Door-to-door transportation is offered to our physically handicapped participants and all of our children attending our after-school programs (we pick them up at school, take them to the program and then take them home). We provide pick-up points in several of our communities to assist mentally impaired persons to get to our program sites. One of our vans will stop at a designated area (usually a park district building) and pick up persons attending our programs, and then drop them off again. Since our area is over 100 blocks long, this is an excellent opportunity for parents or participants to save a lot of driving time. The Drawbacks of Providing Transportation As helpful all of this transportation is in program planning and making life easier for our participants and their families, it does have its drawbacks. 1) Finding qualified drivers who can work odd hours is very frustrating and time consuming. 2) It takes a major chunk out of our budget which we would prefer to use on direct programming. 3) A major part of one staff member's time is spent putting together routes, scheduling vans and drivers and making sure the vans are properly maintained. During the program season, the vans are on the road as much as 14 hours per day. To handle these matters, in 1988 the WSSRA created the position of Manager of Safety and Operations. This employee oversees all transportation matters, and the related area of risk management. This shifting of responsibility from several people to one employee has made our transportation service more efficient. What do other SRA's do? Most own 1 - 6 vans or mini-busses, provide door-to-door transportation for their physically handicapped participants, provide rides for leisure-education programs, special events and excursion programs. A number of SRA's also borrow vehicles from their member park districts. All of the driving is done by full-time or part-time staff who also work in the program. Transportation Services . . . Here to Stay Is there a way out of transportation? In our area, we don't think so. Public transportation isn't the answer; it hasn't proven to be efficient or timely enough. Participants or their families transporting themselves hasn't worked out. Many parents work or don't own cars and our area is very spread out. Doing away with transportation isn't the answer, either. As Mary Ellen Bilek, WSSRAs Outreach Specialist says, "Without transportation, we would be eliminating many options for our programs, for people who are in great need for our services". In the future we will make every effort to reduce our subsidy of transportation by raising fees for the service and by coordinating with other carriers already transporting our participants. We are hopeful that recent actions by the Regional Transportation Authority will make public transportation in our communities useable by adults and children in our programs.
Comment Line
#1 Threat — The Duo of Alcohol and Tobacco
The following letter was mailed in response to an editorial feature, "DRUGS: How You Can Join the Drug War", which was authored by IAPD Executive Director Ted Flickinger and appeared in the Nov. /Dec. IPR, page 37. Dear Ted, I read with interest your editorial on Drugs and how we can join the Drug War. I would like to challenge you with some ideas on the subject. President Bush's statement in the opening paragraph was excellent up to his last sentence. Our most serious drug problem is not cocaine, but the duo of alcohol and tobacco. Alcohol is responsible for over 1/2 of all traffic fatalities, house fires, murders, rapes, and on and on. Tobacco is responsible for approximately 350,000 deaths per year — that's more than those (Americans) killed in all the years of Vietnam. Put these two drugs together, and all other drugs seem insignificant in comparison. Check at your local high school to see what the drug of choice is — it will be alcohol. The number 1 killer of teens is alcohol — does that help you decide what the #1 drug problem is? So why doesn't President Bush attack alcohol and tobacco? It reminds me of when the statistics came out on the causes of paralysis from different sports. Football was the #1 cause by far. Quite a bit lower on the list came #2 - the trampoline. Guess which activity was banned in most schools?
People want drugs. They have a weakness which says: If I take this drug I can be the kind of person I'd like to be all the time, or I need to get rid of this headache, or I need to be up, or down, or I need my Tobacco's social acceptability is currently on somewhat of a decline, which is great. Alcohol, on the other hand is so socially acceptable that we don't even consider it a drug. The (Continued on page 34)
Comment Line body knows what it is, however, and treats it like the poison it is, detoxifying it in the liver. To get into the real basic reasons for this problem and other types of decay in our country might become more of a spiritual discussion between us, which I'd be glad to have sometime. Might I suggest that you add the following items to your list of suggestions, if people really want to make a difference?: • Ban all smoking in all facilities. • Ban the use of alcohol in all facilities. • Offer smoking cessation classes. • Do not accept any advertising from tobacco or alcohol companies. Publish these suggestions and watch it hit the fan! When greed is put ahead of people, we have funny things happen — like all the hype over certain drugs, but not others. Thanks for your ear.
EDITORS NOTE: In defense of President Bush, he recently made the following public commentary on alcohol abuse to a group of anti-alcoholism leaders in Washington, D.C.: "We must teach our children that alcohol is a drug and any irresponsible drug use is wrong and that driving drunk is a crime; it's a violent crime." Bush called drunken driving "one of the most deadly scourges ever to strike modern time". Nearly half of the nation's annual 50,000 highway fatalities are from alcohol-related accidents; drunken driving is the leading cause of death for young Americans between the ages of 16 and 35. "(Alcohol abuse) is as crippling as crack, as random as gang violence, and it's killing more kids than both combined," Bush said. "Drunk driving is a grave crisis." Bush went on to say he has told Transportation Secretary Sam Skinner that "the fight against drunk and drugged driving is one of the key transportation goals of the Bush administration".
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