A COMPASS Driver Shares Her Story

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Introduction

As part of our initiative to find new ways to capture and elevate mobility on-demand (MOD) drivers’ voices, we are pleased to share the perspective of Charlene Hall, a driver for Cecil County’s COMPASS microtransit pilot.

Charlene’s presentation was originally part of the January 2023 Mobility Innovation Collaborative Quarterly Meeting

Charlene’s Story

Transcript

Alvaro Villagran

Welcome everybody to our Mobility innovation collaborative all-grantee quarterly meeting for this quarter. My name is Alvaro Villagran. I am the Director of Federal Programs at the Shared-Use Mobility Center, and I will be moderating and emceeing today’s meeting. It is a pleasure to have you all here with us. So moving on into today’s meeting, here is the agenda. It is included in the calendar invite for those of you who cannot see the slides here. We’re going to start in a couple of minutes with our main session for today. It is “Insights on Mobility-on-Demand Services from a Driver’s Perspective.” This is a session that we tried to put together for the workshop we were planning last fall and we are very happy and excited that we are able to make it happen in a virtual setting today and very thankful for the participation of the three speakers that are going to be sharing their experience with us.

So as I’m going to be welcoming our three speakers for today, I want to make a very quick comment about the reason why we put together this session. As many of you know we usually talk about on-demand services and microtransit, we hear from vendors, we hear from planners, we hear from the agencies, we try to capture some of the riders’ feedback, we felt that the operator side of the story was missing here. So we made a deliberate effort to try to bring that voice in here from the everyday life of the people who are providing the service and driving and interacting with the passengers and on an in-person basis and dealing with the changes in technology and driving the vehicles. We think that this is going to be a very informative and productive conversation. So before moving forward I want to thank you once again Charlene, Shanghai, Shetera for making the time to join us today. We know that driver shortage is real, we know that your time is more valuable than ever, and having you making time to join us today for this conversation is definitely appreciated and valued so thank you very much. And with that being said, Charlene I’ll let you share your screen and let you share your experience with us first.

Charlene Hall

I’m Charlene Hall from Cecil Transit in Elkton Maryland and we did the Roadway to Recovery project through the IMI Grant. So what our program was is: we had to pick a certain type of audience we would host for this, so we chose to help out the people in recovery houses. They needed ways to get to their jobs, their medical appointments, and some of them have children that went to daycare, and also their recovery meetings.

So I have on the screen a picture of the band barrier up top here. This is a heavy vinyl and plastic barrier between the driver and the passengers. I like the barrier because I feel like it protects me especially when they get in when they’re sick, or their kids are coughing or sneezing, or the kids throwing something. One day, actually, a kid was in a car seat diagonal to where you can see there and he rolled the window down, his mom was back there, and he grabbed her soda and threw it out the window. I’m glad it went that way but I felt like that would help. Some of the Riders don’t like the barrier because of they like to talk to the driver, but I like it

Here’s a picture of the tablet in a secured holder in the cup holder. You can see a cup right here so you can get the gist of where it is. And here it clips and unclips so you can take it with you if you need to be excused from the van for any time. We use Uber technology and it is pretty self-explanatory. It will give you turn by turn directions like right here it says make a left turn, so it’s just like the regular GPS. Like where it says “in 300 feet you’re gonna make a left turn on to East Main Street” or “you’re coming up on your stop” so that’s a very good tool as well. The tablet is located in a very good position for you to glance at it if you know you have to start the ride when it comes up and it makes a dinging sound and also a blinking black pill comes up so you can accept the ride. With this tablet being here, say you go to an address and you pick up a rider and another rider gets added in during the trip because we have rideshare, then it will tell you another rider has been added. You’re going to either head to that address or if it finds it more efficient for you to drop the passengers off that you already have it will guide you to drop them off first and then go pick up that person or you may pick up that person and it you may even drop that person off first or drop the other people off first. That’s a very good tool that guides you in every way; you need to you don’t even really have to think about it, it just takes you where you need to be.

This app does have a message: if you can converse back and forth with the passenger. So for example, if a passenger doesn’t know exactly the address that they’re at, but they know a point,

like, say, we had one that was close to a medical center. We put the name of that medical center, but they were actually at another building on the other side. So they sent me a message saying “hey I’m at this place,” which was a new urgent care that opened up but hadn’t been

established in the addresses yet. So then I would go over there and pick them up. Other times I had to send a message saying “hey I’m here. I’ve been waiting for three minutes. Are you coming? Where are you?” sometimes they will answer you and say they’re on their way, sometimes they will say “I’m not at that address” and sometimes they just won’t answer you at all. So that is a good tool to have. That has been very helpful 

Some pros is that all the riders are thankful for our service because they say they wouldn’t be able to get to their job and see if they had to pay a full taxi fare to get to their job. Since we only charge two dollars, they wouldn’t have been able to save enough money. Some of them got their own cars. I know two people in my experience got their own cars. One of them was so happy – he had been showing me pictures of the car he was saving up for – that he saw me dropping another rider off at the McDonald’s in Elkton and he pulled in to show me because he was so excited. Another guy – we dropped him off at an approved location so we could pick up another person that was a 18-wheeler truck driver, because he had lost his license because he he needed to be in recovery, and he actually did gain it back and he he bought a car as well. So those are some good success stories about that.

Another point that was good about this is that this technology, well it may be just any Uber technology.The passengers were going to recovery, so they like to sometimes meet each other in the van that I was driving, and they would kind of have a buddy during this very difficult time for them. One of them would schedule a ride from their house and then they would text each other and the other one would schedule the other ride. They had it down to where I picked both of them up they could ride together and go to their meetings, so that was good as well.

And then we have some cons here and we go to the next slide. I also put a picture on this of the driver barrier so you can see it from the passenger’s view. We have these window coverings. Some people like it because it’s privacy; you cannot see in it. Some people don’t like it because they feel confined. If it’s a nice day, I tell them they can roll the window down if they want to, then they feel more comfortable. So one of the cons about this app is that we have one main house that we go to a lot – it’s a recovery house – and the app on the tablet takes you the wrong way. It thinks it should take you down the street and around the corner to the back of the house, which – you can’t even get to it there. And it does that for a few properties. I am from Cecil County, so I know where they’re going, or I know the vicinity of places, but if it was someone that was not from here there have been a few times where they probably would not have known where to go or they would have gone to a totally wrong place. But then hopefully they would have messaged the passenger. that’s a few places and we did try to get Uber to fix that geocode point on the address to take us to the house out front and the other addresses, but it never worked itself out.

And then another thing is it allowed over booking. So we only like to have three people in the back seat. We really didn’t like to have anybody in the front right now because of all the Covid going around, but it would allow them to book up to six people, and we only could fit three so that was a problem. And also if I arrived at the house, and the person booked a ride for themselves and they need to book a ride for two, the app that we have on our tablet won’t allow me to add that rider for them. A lot of them, you know, they have older phones and it takes them a while to get connected or they have to be on the internet to be connected, so once they come out it’s not so easy for them to add that additional rider. So if if they would agree to pay the extra two dollars and said “I can’t figure it out; can you add the rider for me?” then I would have been able to have been more helpful to them in that instance.

And also, say I’m going to pick up a rider. She has to go to work but she has to drop her child off at daycare first. This is a real situation. So I pick her up, I get to take her to daycare and she doesn’t want me to leave her there, because if I do, if I pull away and then I have to hit the order again she may be late for work or I may get another ride. And I have to follow what the tablet tells me, so the app did not allow her to book an additional ride after I dropped her off at daycare for me to be able to pick her up from daycare and take her to work. I didn’t want to wait more than five minutes, but when we were a little bit away from the daycare, I went ahead and completed her trip on the tablet so that the app would think I dropped her off and it would even say that you dropped her off because it knows it protects you, to make sure you’re safe. And I’ll say yes, I did and then she still couldn’t book the ride, even though I told it to after I dropped her off. So I had to sit there, and it takes like five minutes or more for them to be able to book their ride back because that was a faulty thing that we had to deal with with the tablet as well. 

And then when there were other girls waiting to be picked up to take their kid to daycare as well, because remember – I only could take three people, I can’t take four – so the other girl, to book the ride, because I’m only dropping the other girl off a few miles away, so she went to book the ride so she could be next, the app would not allow her to do that. It kept on saying “no rider available,” “no drivers available.” It would have been more helpful if the app could have said “if you would like to accept this ride it could be here in 30 to 45 minutes.” Then the girl would have been happy with that and she would have accepted it and she would have waited instead of them saying there’s no ride available. I think that is something that would work out better for the people as well.

There was a girl that was working at McDonald’s. And it is not that far from the house, but a little bit of a walk, especially at nine o’clock at night. She got off at nine o’clock at night and we used to provide her a ride home every night, and then we had to reduce our service to stop at nine, because we had no other rider. And, you know, we were working over so we cut the service off at nine temporarily for a while and she was no longer able to get her. So I said “why don’t you book it 15 minutes before you get off to make sure you get the ride?” I said “10 minutes before you get off work” and she said “I tried 10 minutes, I tried 15 minutes, it won’t let me book it because you’re about to close.” so I think we were going to stay on until nine, so even if she booked it at 8:55 or even 8:59, we would have still taken her home. But I think that’s something that could be better as well. I mean if you say “I was gonna cut off at 8:45 because we closed at night,” I can always not accept a trip, but there was no ability for her to be able to get home which was sad because it only took a few minutes to take her home and she only lives a few minutes from where our end of the day would be anyway. So that could be worked out as well.

I have some pictures as requested, let me get my mouse on my right screen here. This is a picture of the van that we use. We do have – some people call it a wheelchair ramp, we call it a mobility device because it could be used for anything like a scooter wheelchair. There is a ramp back here they can get in. This is a sliding door slides open on both sides for the rideshare. And this is – privacy, you cannot see in these windows at all, but you can roll them down if you feel claustrophobic. And then on the last screen we have this is a genuine picture here, this is one of the houses. This is the main house where it tries to take you down the road and around the back where you can’t even get in. We live near farmland and it’s just fields like that. This is one of the day cares, and this is a Taco Bell. I stole this one because I wasn’t able to get a Taco Bell picture. That’s where one of the girls gonna work out a lot and then this is where the guy would get dropped off at the truck stop and meet that trucker guy and train until he could get his license back, and then he was able to get a car. And this is a distribution center that’s approximately 19 miles from here, but it is in our county and I used to drop somebody here off at night time, and he worked the overnight shift, and that was a good job. So any questions?

Alvaro Villagran

Thank you, Charlene. I want to thank everybody again for staying with us and hopefully this is very helpful for you all. stay safe, everybody and have a good rest of the day.

Conclusion

Bringing MOD drivers’ experiences to the forefront of MOD conversations adds a valuable perspective that can make for better systems for passengers, operations staff, planners, dispatchers, and drivers alike. Thank you to Charlene Hall and Cecil County for helping share this story.

For more information on COMPASS Ready!, check out our case study on the Mobility Learning Center.

Our effort to capture drivers’ stories is ongoing, and could use your help! If you are a transit agency or operator of mobility on demand services and would like to participate in this project, contact us at mic@sharedusemobilitycenter.org for instructions and interview questions.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please email us at mic@sharedusemobilitycenter.org.