Paratransit services are a very large industry providing transportation services for disabled and elderly customers across the country. Demand for these services has been drastically and steadily growing since the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990) and will still be growing in the foreseeable future. Compared to a centralized operating strategy, some large transit agencies are currently adopting a decentralized zoning operating strategy for easier management and better overall reliability (higher percentage of on-time performance). However, this strategy is inefficient in a way that service provider’s vehicle is not allowed to pick up customers outside its own service zone, thus hampering ridesharing and increasing the empty trip miles driven. To address this issue, this paper explored innovative ADA operating strategies by allowing service providers to serve both trips of cross-zonal customers in need of round trip rides. Three innovative policies were proposed. New algorithms were also developed toincorporate the proposed strategies into the insertions heuristic. Simulation experiments based on Houston and Los Angeles data were conducted to quantify the performance improvement compared to current policy. Results showed that, without sacrificing customers’ level of service, our best policy can significantly reduce the inefficient empty trip miles by up to 25%. As a result, it can save up to 6.8% assigned vehicles and lower the total mileage by 8 percent,implying a significant saving in operation cost by adopting our policy while maintaining a reasonable level of service quality.
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