Research Pays Off: Can Travel Training Services Save Public Transportation Agencies Money?

Travel training services may offer public transportation agencies an alternative to providing increasingly costly paratransit service to customers with disabilities. Research to understand the outcomes and financial implications of travel training services, however, has been scant.

To address this issue, a cost–benefit model was tested to measure the value that travel training services can provide to transportation agencies.

The data indicate that for every $1.00 used to purchase travel training services, the three agencies participating in study saved or diverted from $1.45 to $3.98, which equates to net benefits of $200,000 to $440,000 annually.

The savings in large part result from the travel trainers’ abilities to teach customers how to use fixed-route transit successfully—instead of relying on paratransit—for some or all of their trips. Reasons for the differences in the ratios included economies of scale, distances traveled, and the costs of the fixed-route and paratransit services.