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PARATRANSIT King County Metro saves is nice, the CAT program's success is its ability to provide better options. "Te focus is to still provide transportation for people in the region, so these rides CAT is providing, whether they are taking riders of of our Access services or not, enable King County Metro to provide mobility to the community," he says. "Tat is truly our focus — the mobility — and not exactly the cost savings." Due to the slumping economy, growth of the CAT program has slowed since King County Metro has fewer funds to put toward expansion. Okazaki explains, however, that the agency is still open to taking on more partners. "We kind of froze the list in the last cou- ple of years because we didn't have any more money for vehicles or operating expenses," he says. "What we have done, then, is begin targeting more of the larger agencies that could do the community or neighborhood shuttles and urge them to apply for state grants, so we could then look into providing them with the matching funds and vehicles." ORANGE COUNTY TRANSPORTATION AUTHORITY (OCTA) Orange, Calif. Rotary has the broadest line of inground lifts in the industry. For more than 85 years, Rotary has set the standard in design, testing and manufacturing. Our Indiana-based employees take pride in producing world-class lifts the right way, every day. You can count on it. Call 800-448-5383 for more information or see our complete line of heavy-duty lifts at rotarylift.com/inground/mm. 40 < mETRO mAGAZINE MAY 2013 In the early 2000s, OCTA began seeing year-over-year double-digit growth on its ACCESS paratransit services due to the rapidly aging population. To help address that growth as well as the fnancial strain it began to pose on OCTA, the agency launched a comprehensive paratransit growth management study from 2003 to 2004, which focused on finding strategies it could employ to help better manage its services. "Looking at our comprehensive business plan and forecasting out, we saw that if we didn't do something to manage the growth and expense of our paratransit service, it would put our whole transit system in jeopardy," says Dana Wiemiller, OCTA's manager, community transportation services. Wiemiller adds the upshot of the study was OCTA knew it wouldn't discover a "silver bullet" but rather find a number of different strategies to rein in costs to make ACCESS services more manageable and sustainable. Following the study, OCTA put together a growth management plan and stopped providing paratransit services beyond the required three-quarter mile corridor as well as extending its pickup window from 20 minutes to 30 minutes. Next, OCTA looked at certain segments of its customer base to see if it could fnd more creative ways to provide some of those trips. Following the growth management study, which found that one-third of its customers were using ACCESS services to go to and from adult day health care programs, OCTA then launched another study the following year that included metro-magazine.com