Officials: take senior transportation into account when developing

Changing the way local governments look at development and how they apply transit to their designs can help assure that Clark County residents will be able to age in place.

That was the takeaway of a summit on transportation hosted at Clark College Feb. 21. Spurred in part by a report from the Clark County Commission on Aging released early this year, the summit featured local agency leaders who spoke on what steps needed to be taken to facilitate aging in place.

The event brought in about 80 individuals who participated during survey questions that interspersed the summit. The last question dealt with where local governments and agencies should focus their services to help individuals age in place. Most respondents selected community design and proximity to destinations, followed closely by universal mobility as a service.

AARP’s Public Policy Institute’s Livable Communities Senior Strategic Policy Advisor Jana Lynott touched on universal mobility extensively in her speech. One of two guest speakers, the other being Washington State Secretary of Transportation Roger Millar, Lynott focused on developments specifically with technology that have led to on-demand mobility. 

While ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft are well-known in the United States, she pointed to FlexDanmark, itself a technology company owned by several Danish regional transportation authorities, as offering a model that can coordinate as many as close to 25,000 rides a day across the country. She stressed the importance of strides toward opening up transit to more segments of the population, something that projects like FlexDanmark’s ride coordination does.

Where we are at

Lynott joined local leaders for a panel discussion following the presentations that focused on where Clark County was regarding its transportation options, specifically for the aging population. Moderated by Southwest Washington Regional Transportation Council Executive Director Matt Ransom the first question asked of them was specifically where local agency heads (and Lynott) felt the county was in its transportation network compared to nationwide.

Clark County Public Works Director Ahmad Qayoumi felt Clark County was in the middle of the pack, drawing from experience of other transportation systems he saw while working in San Jose, California, the Midwest and the Tri-Cities area previous to his arrival as county head.

He said the old paradigm of building more to solve congestion has changed and said it was important to look at rezoning and building communities at a pedestrian scale “so that you don’t have to travel far to get to whatever services you need.”

C-Tran CEO Shawn Donaghy said the county is “slightly below midway” among transportation systems, specifically on how the county has positioned itself for future development with regard to aging populations. One of the county’s major challenges was connecting the rapid growth in north and eastern parts of the county to services, from critical medical appoints to “something as simple as the grocery store.”

According to Donaghy, challenges around serving those populations aren’t exclusive to Clark County. 

 “I don’t really think there’s any transportation network in the United States that has really solved that problem,” he said. 

Lynott prefaced by saying she didn’t have too much time to make an assessment, having arrived in Clark County just for that week, though she said she was slightly more optimistic than the other panelists.

“I think you have a good foundation here,” Lynott said, pointing to a “very engaged and forward-thinking Commission on Aging.”

Clark County’s part of the country generally had a greater awareness of public transit’s benefits compared to others, Lynott said, giving an example of other places in the U.S. where lack of resources led to “horror stories.” She recalled one community meeting in a southern state where a chemotherapy patient would have to cut their treatment short or wait several hours following it just to use a bus.

How to improve

The panelists were later asked how the county could best improve. 

Qayoumi felt that local agencies hadn’t really looked at zoning as a way for improvement. He said that zoning patterns and the types of development it brought had been largely the same since the post-World War II era which tended to focus on automotive travel and partitioned zoning that separated residential, commercial and public service areas.

He said a solution would be to “fundamentally change our zoning” to require developments to meet all the needs of the proposed neighborhoods internally so residents wouldn’t have to rely on multi-mile automobile trips. 

“The sense of community has really gone away. A lot of times we don’t even know our neighbor,” Qayoumi remarked. He gave examples of communities like Redmond and Kirkland that were re-developing on a smaller, pedestrian scale. 

Human Services Council Executive Director Colleen Kuhn said that outside the scale of development, cost has been an issue. She gave an example of a medical facility that primarily serves low-income patients that had to purchase property away from a bus line for financial reasons though most of their clientele used the bus.

Donaghy said that historically public transit generally dealt with operations internally among staff and ridership, though now they needed to be more involved with issues like land use planning and public-private partnerships. 

Kuhn brought up one example of that partnership — a “one-call, 

one-click” trip resource center that provides transit resources for individuals based on where they are and where they need to head. 

In improving transportation Donaghy said public transit should not be “an afterthought” for community development, remarking that the most irresponsible form of it was simply reactionary.

“You have to understand what the community wants and what it’s about,” Donaghy said, explaining that understanding the demographics of a community began with its development. He mentioned that as a whole, local governments have been “very receptive” to C-Tran’s improvement efforts.

How technology can help

Going back to Lynott’s explanation of technology’s boon to transit services, panelists were asked if there was any “silver bullet” to solve issues for the aging population.

Qayoumi didn’t believe there were any tech silver bullets, but they could be useful as a tool. He referenced an “explosion” of use of electric scooters in San Jose and added that keeping an eye on the horizon was important in building communities ready to take advantage.

“When we plan on developing our system it cannot be just only auto-oriented. It has to include other modes of transportation,” Qayoumi said. “Even if it’s not built there, at least it’s planned to make sure that as the technology advances we have those (modes) planned out and it will be easy to implement them.”

Kuhn said that her agency’s resource center has an online presence where an individual can indicate where they are and where they need to head, though it also has a phone presence for those for whom the internet was not a viable medium. 

“For the foreseeable future it’s going to have to be technology-plus,” Kuhn remarked, explaining that although tech can help, there continues to be a need for more traditional avenues of coordination.

“For the younger population it’s a whole different ball game,” Kuhn added, explaining that those individuals could be a benefit to aging populations through their own use of technology. She mentioned her council has applied for a grant to develop a volunteer driver smartphone application that could be used, for example, by college students during downtime between classes to give back to their community.

“Let’s make it as easy as possible for them (to volunteer) through the use of technology,” Kuhn remarked.

Donaghy said the future would have to be “cutting-edge technology with common sense,” adding that “just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s great, doesn’t mean it’s effective.”

Donaghy referred to Qayoumi’s San Jose scooter example adding that the technology could become an issue for populations with limited mobility as the vehicles are left unattended on sidewalks.

“In our quest to be ‘fresh’ we have actually disenfranchised the Greatest Generation or people who need to get around town that have accessibility issues,” Donaghy said. Any embrace of new concepts or devices would need field-testing by users.

Panelists were asked if advancements of technology could potentially lead to competition between startups and systems like C-Tran. Donaghy took issue with a common concept in the transit industry that ridesharing services were “disruptors” — he called them complementary services to gaps in agencies’ resources. 

Kuhn said partnerships or coordination between would-be competitors was important in order to ensure resources were used best.

“There’s way more need than we have resources to address those needs,” Kuhn remarked.

It will take teamwork

Current Clark County Councilor and former Clark County Commission on Aging Chair Temple Lentz closed out the summit, remarking that for any of the potential solutions to happen it would take the work of county and local governments and support agencies cooperating to make sure people here can age in place.

“It’s all about partnerships. That’s the only way that we are going to get anything done,” she said.