Paratransit Costs Six Times a Bus Ride, and the Bill Just Hit $7 Billion

The Americans with Disabilities Act does not let a transit agency simply run a bus route and call it done.▸ Since 1990, any agency that operates fixed buses or trains has also had to offer "complementary paratransit" — door-to-door, shared-ride service for people who cannot use the fixed route — to anywhere within three-quarters of a mile of it, on request, at close to the regular fare. That obligation is a civil right, not a budget line item transit agencies can choose to cut. But it is also, per the federal government's own accounting, the most expensive thing most transit agencies do per trip. In 2024 it cost the country $7.06 billion.

The Federal Transit Administration's National Transit Database collects operating expenses and ridership from every transit agency in the country, mode by mode.▸ Summed across the "demand response" mode — the category that covers ADA paratransit along with related dial-a-ride and senior shared-ride service many smaller agencies run under the same code — national spending rose from $5.69 billion in 2022 to $7.06 billion in 2024, a 24% increase in two years.

Almost all of that increase tracks ridership, not price.▸ Trips rose 23.6% over the same two years — from 113.0 million to 139.7 million — while the average cost per trip barely moved, sitting at $50.34 in 2022 and $50.55 in 2024. The bill is growing because more people are riding, not because each ride is getting sharply more expensive.

What each ride costs, though, is still the story.▸ A paratransit trip is inherently a different product than a fixed bus route: one vehicle, one reservation, one pickup and drop-off, often with a wheelchair lift and a driver trained to assist a rider door to door. Fixed-route buses spread their driver and vehicle cost over dozens of boardings per hour; paratransit vans spread it over one trip, sometimes two.

The math nationally: $30.12 billion spent moving 3.66 billion fixed-route bus riders works out to $8.24 a trip.▸ $7.06 billion moving 139.7 million paratransit riders works out to $50.55 a trip — 6.1 times as much. That gap is not unique to any one city; it is the arithmetic of demand-response service everywhere, and it is why paratransit consistently consumes a share of transit budgets far larger than its share of riders.

New York City Transit runs the largest paratransit system in the country by riders — Access-A-Ride, serving five boroughs, around the clock, because the subway and buses it complements never stop running.▸ The New York State Office of the State Comptroller found that from 2016 to 2019, before the pandemic, the program's costs rose 8.5% a year — more than double the 3.6% annual growth of the MTA's overall expenses — which pushed the agency to change how it delivers rides.

MTA-run "primary carrier" vans — the blue-and-white Access-A-Ride fleet — averaged $116 a ride in April 2023.▸ Trips routed instead to contracted "broker" providers, mostly car services paid per trip, averaged $40. Shifting the mix is the single biggest lever the MTA has pulled: the share of trips on primary-carrier vans fell from 68.3% in 2013 to 23.2% in April 2023, and that gap between the two modes' cost per ride widened from $33 in 2013 to $76 by 2023.

The tradeoff shows up in reliability, not price.▸ Comparing July 2022 through July 2023, primary-carrier vans failed to pick up a scheduled passenger on fewer than one occasion per 1,000 scheduled rides; broker trips failed 3.89 times per 1,000 — up from a 2.6-per-1,000 failure rate in the prior several years. On-time pickups (within 15 minutes of the scheduled window) ran 85.8% for primary carrier service versus 81.7% for brokers over the same multi-year window. The Comptroller's office ties part of that gap directly to labor: broker firms, largely staffed by contracted drivers rather than agency employees, "experienced a lack of drivers as labor shortages plagued many businesses" through the service shift — the same driver market every transit agency in the country has been competing in.

That tradeoff is not free to riders.▸ New York's paratransit registrant base grew 9.1% from July 2020 to July 2023, reaching 176,797 people eligible for the service, and the MTA's own forecasts anticipate registrant trips climbing 5% a year — from 7.83 million in 2023 to 9.52 million by 2027 — while total program costs are projected to rise from roughly $592 million to $695 million over the same span. Cheaper broker service is what makes that growth affordable at all; less reliable broker service is the price attached to it.

National figures cover NTD's "demand response" mode, which is broader than ADA-mandated paratransit alone but is the only standardized national accounting of this kind of service; New York figures are specific to NYC Transit's Access-A-Ride program and its April 2023 reporting month unless otherwise noted.