How Transit Agencies Can Add Same-Day Wheelchair-Accessible Vehicle Capacity
It’s 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, and your reservation line rings. A rider who uses a power wheelchair has waited months to see a specialist, and a cancellation just opened a 3:30 p.m. slot today. But they need a ride to get there. Your paratransit service requires one-day prior notice, so the best answer you can give is, “We can get you there tomorrow.”
Now the rider has to choose:
Pay out of pocket for a wheelchair van
Ask a friend for a favor (assuming they have a wheelchair-accessible vehicle, or WAV)
Don’t go
This isn’t a one-off scenario. It’s happening daily nationwide. Consider one rider’s journey in Nassau County, NY, where 8% of the population (about 114,000 people) lives with disabilities.
A rider’s personal WAV broke down and they need a ride home. The local paratransit system isn’t an option because it requires one to three days’ notice and only operates within three quarters of a mile of public bus routes. The rider calls a local taxi company, but no WAVs are available. Frustrated, the rider finally calls a local non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) company and has to pay $90 for a four-mile ride from work to home.
How Same-Day WAV Service Benefits Agencies, Call Center Staff, and Riders
What would’ve been different had that same rider lived in Hayward, CA, or the Denver, CO metro area? Quite a bit.
Hayward Operated Paratransit (HOP) works with a partner that builds and manages a network of local WAV providers, so riders who use wheelchairs can book Same-Day WAV rides.
Riders book trips via text or phone and can schedule those trips with only 1 hour advance notice. This improves both quality of life and the scheduling experience for riders while taking pressure off call center staff due to a lower call volume. The agency gets real-time visibility into trips and performance metrics it uses to improve service quality.
Same-Day Service Must Ensure Equal Access to All Riders
Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), transit agencies that run fixed-route service must also offer paratransit to riders who aren’t able to use it. Same-Day service is optional. But if your agency offers Same-Day service to some qualified riders, it must also provide equivalent service to qualified riders who use mobility devices such as wheelchairs.
As the U.S. Department of Transportation put it in a colleague letter, “It would not be appropriate, for example, to offer real-time service to ambulatory paratransit riders, while leaving wheelchair users with next-day service.”
Federal Transit Administration (FTA) guidance explains what this means in practice. Riders who need a WAV can’t be charged more or wait longer than other riders for a similar trip. So an agency can’t launch a Same-Day service that relies solely on sedans. It needs enough accessible vehicles to provide equivalent service, whether those vehicles come from a ride-sourcing partner, a separate provider, or its own paratransit fleet.
The question is, how do you create a same-day WAV service that’s both cost effective and equitable?
Barriers to Adding Same-Day Wheelchair-Accessible Rides
Right now, many wheelchair users need to call paratransit providers one to three days in advance to schedule a trip. Adding Same-Day wheelchair-accessible capacity can make their lives easier, more spontaneous, and equivalent to ambulatory public transit riders.
So, why haven’t more transit agencies and municipalities done so? Part of the reason is economics; paratransit trips cost far more to run than fixed-route trips. Additionally, few agencies have the vehicles, technology, and resources to manage a Same-Day program.
To make a Same-Day program effective, agencies must have WAVs available on short notice, which can be challenging, especially for agencies covering large geographies. A February 2025 report from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) shows why. It revealed that WAV programs completed 88% of pre-scheduled trip requests but only 62% of on-demand requests. In suburban and rural communities, the gap was even larger.
Other barriers are communication, headcount, and training. Few agencies have enough call center staff to handle the added volume of riders that Same-Day WAV could bring, nor do they have the ability to implement real-time notifications to riders awaiting a pickup. And many WAV and NEMT providers that could supply agencies with Same-Day capacity aren’t set up to run the background checks, drug and alcohol testing, and training FTA requires of WAV drivers.
It’s important to underscore that adding Same-Day WAV service is a major undertaking for an agency without the help of a partner. Many agencies have decided to simply not offer Same-Day service because of the listed barriers associated with Same-Day WAV operations.
How to Build a Same-Day WAV Program in 4 Steps
If you’ve decided to add Same-Day WAV service, getting started requires four phases: estimating demand, choosing a program model, building the systems to run it, and improving it as you go. This overview won’t cover funding the service, we’ll write a separate article about that.
1. Set your Starting Point
Most agencies want to start by forecasting Same-Day demand. But that number is very hard to pin down before launch. Next-day booking has held demand down for decades. When every trip takes a phone call and a day’s notice, riders take fewer trips. Once booking gets easy, trips go up, sometimes sharply.
So instead of calculating demand up front, set a clear starting point, launch with guardrails, and learn the actual demand through a pilot. A non-dedicated model makes this easier. You pay for the trips riders take, not for vans sitting idle, so you don’t need a precise forecast to get started.
Your starting point should cover five things:
Audit how your WAVs are used today. Are your accessible vehicles carrying riders who need them? Often ambulatory riders end up in vans because that’s what was free. Moving those trips to sedans frees up WAV capacity before you add any.
Plan for ambulatory riders too. About 80% of paratransit riders are ambulatory, and sedans are much easier to find than WAVs. Same-Day service for one group means equivalent service for the other, so plan both together.
Log unfilled and late WAV requests. For each one, note the requested time, how far ahead it was booked, the pickup and drop-off zones, the rider’s mobility device, and why it was late or never covered.
Set your guardrails. Decide on service zones, hours, how far ahead riders can book, and any monthly trip limits. Apply the same rules to riders who use wheelchairs and riders who don’t.
Budget for growth. Trips will rise once booking is easy. Set a target cost per trip and a monthly budget, and decide ahead of time what you’ll do if demand goes past it.
Set expectations with riders. Riders should keep scheduling trips they know about ahead of time, like recurring medical appointments. Same-Day rides are for the moments life doesn’t plan ahead — a cancellation slot at the doctor, a last-minute errand, dinner with a friend. Riders who use wheelchairs have fewer options for spontaneous trips than almost anyone, and that’s the point of the service.
2. Choose a Program Model
The most important thing you can do when you set out to start a Same-Day WAV program is know that you have options. Buying new vans, hiring, training and staffing etc. on your own is not the only way.
In-house Dedicated Fleets: Your agency buys the vehicles, hires the drivers, and runs booking and dispatch. (Heaviest lift)
Non-Dedicated Fleet partnerships: Your partner builds a network of WAV providers and hires and manages the driver workforce. (Lightest lift)
Hybrid partnerships: Your agency assigns some of its own WAVs to Same-Day trips. Your partner’s non-dedicated provider network then takes the trip requests your fleet can’t cover.
The in-house model gives agencies the most control, but it also means taking on every cost, productivity risk, and challenge at once: buying WAVs recruiting and retaining drivers to meet federal standards, staffing a call center for real-time requests, and covering vehicle costs even when rides aren’t booked — before truly knowing how much demand to expect and where.
It comes down to cost per trip. Most of a dedicated van’s cost is fixed: the vehicle, insurance, maintenance, and a driver paid by the hour. Those costs are the same whether the van runs 10 trips a month or 200. So cost per trip is highest when demand is low or uncertain, which is exactly where a new Same-Day program starts. With a non-dedicated partner, you pay per trip, so the cost per trip stays the same whatever the volume.
That’s why starting with a non-dedicated or hybrid partnership is a win-win-win. Your agency avoids buying vehicles and hiring drivers for demand it can’t yet predict. Local WAV providers get more trips, along with the tools, training, and technology to meet FTA requirements. And wheelchair users get timely service they can rely on.
As demand grows and becomes predictable, dedicated vans can start to pay off. A hybrid model lets you add them where trips are steady while a partner covers overflow and peak hours.
3. Build the Systems to Manage Same-Day Service
Before you launch, set up the infrastructure to keep Same-Day service running. The big buckets include the following:
Rider communication: Determine how riders will book, confirm trips, and get real-time updates when a driver arrives or is running late, without needing to call.
Internal benchmarks: Set targets for fulfillment rate, on-time performance, wait times, and rider ratings so you can monitor program effectiveness.
Service regions: Decide where Same-Day service will be available and how far ahead riders will need to book.
Target ride costs: Estimate the cost per trip your budget can sustain as volume grows. Also consider a premium fare and subsidy caps to make the program more sustainable.
Network providers: Set rules for how WAV drivers will be sourced, vetted, and trained to meet federal requirements.
Feedback loops - Your WAV drivers/providers need a way to quickly escalate in the event that an issue arises. Same with your customers.
For hybrid Same-Day programs, limited pilots can be a way to soft-launch a service if you can’t accurately forecast demand. Consider introducing a new service to a handful of riders instead of marketing it to everyone. Let the program run for a few months so word can spread organically, then add capacity as needed based on demand.
4. Communication and Data Insights Go Hand In Hand
Creating rider and driver feedback loops is the best way to obtain near-real-time sentiment about the program. The gold standard is a trip review from each rider and driver after a trip is completed. This gives teams an accurate data sample for analysis and can provide context clues when questions arise.
If you’re choosing a hybrid or an outsourced program, it’s imperative that you understand the communication and data tools that are available to you partners and how they interact with your systems. Are they integrated, will you have a dashboard with reporting, how are escalations managed, what happens if you need to move away from a provider due to a performance issue? These are all things to be thinking about when you’re considering your comms and data visibility.
How One Agency Increased Monthly WAV Rides 7.7x
One municipal paratransit agency’s experience shows how non-dedicated WAV capacity can help provide Same-Day service to wheelchair users.
HOP serves individuals over age 70 and riders with disabilities. Like many agencies, HOP had limited access to WAVs, call center bottlenecks, and a fragmented rider experience, yet wanted to provide Same-Day WAV service to its residents. To do so, HOP partnered with Onward to launch a turnkey program, funded through Measure BB, a one-cent sales tax for countywide transportation that sets aside dollars for older adults.
Onward built and managed a reliable pool of Companion Drivers and a network of local WAV providers. The Onward platform gives the city real-time trip visibility, performance reporting, and program transparency. Riders can book a ride by text or phone.
Before its partnership with Onward, HOP’s same-day accessible fulfillment was 0%. Today it’s 99.4%. HOP went from completing 49 WAV rides monthly to 378 with Onward. Its on-time percentage grew from 89.5% to 99.3%, and riders give the service an aggregate rating of 4.83 stars.
Complement Your Existing Programs With Same-Day Service
A simple trip to the pharmacy shouldn’t need to be planned out days in advance, yet that’s the unfortunate reality for wheelchair users in many municipalities nationwide. By adding Same-Day WAV service to complement your existing offerings, your agency can help people with disabilities preserve their independence without taking on the full cost and complexity of adding vehicles or drivers.
To learn how a partner like Onward works with transit agencies to provide Same-Day WAV service, visit Onward’s Same-Day WAV hub.
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