For many, keeping track of and making it to doctor appointments and social engagements, along with managing errands like grocery shopping, can be a pretty demanding chore. But at Colonie Senior Services, that task is multiplied by 700.
That’s the number of seniors who are served by the organization’s transportation offerings. Senior Services has seven vans that transport the center’s seniors around the Capital District. Vans can hold 12 passengers and the service runs about 80 trips a day.
That task will hopefully be getting easier with a $5,000 grant from the The John. D. Picotte Family Foundation to fund a more cohesive and organized transportation system for seniors. The money will help pay for the $8,000 cost for PtMS Paratransit Software, which enables a more efficient routing system.
“We just felt that they’re one of the best senior service organizations locally and we try to be supportive of their many different programs,” said Jackie Mahoney, director of grant making at John. D. Picotte Family Foundation.
The foundation makes about 700 grants a year for education, health care, science, arts and more. Mahoney said she thought the grant for CSSC would do a lot of good.
“They just happened to apply for the grant and we thought it would be very helpful to get seniors to doctor appointments,” she said.
The software is GIS – a geographic information system – that will help easily group trips. Each senior will have their name added to the system, with their schedule and the addresses of where they need to go. The GIS portion of the software will help to organize a van’s trips so every one is more efficient. Information can be added into the database as time goes on, and it will be organized and incorporated into routes for the coming days.
Before purchasing the software in July, the center used different software but manually managed the scheduling for the trips. With the new system, it automatically saves the scheduling.
Executive Director of Colonie Senior Service Center Ed Neary said they had been looking for a different transportation programs over the years.
“Using the same software scheduling program for many years worked for us, but it didn’t allow us to grow or expand or interface with anybody,” Neary said. “One of the principal reasons we wanted to try this is to be able to communicate better.”
The new software works directly with the Capital District Transportation Authority’s ACCESS program, which arranges transportation for Albany County seniors. Using communication within the software, ACCESS helps coordinate resources with Colonie Senior Services. If a senior will be staying longer at a destination than expected, for example, Senior Services can work with ACCESS to find an alternative resource for that person, like a taxi that works with CDTA.
“When we have a need we can’t fulfill, ACCESS will find another resource to make sure that person has transportation services,” Neary said.
By using the same software as ACCESS, Neary said they “thought it would make things easier.”
“It has, it does and it will,” he said.
Since the new program has been up and running since July, Director of CSSC Transportation Services Larry Conaway said it’s “going really, really good.”
“(There are) a lot of advantages to it. The software takes into account mileage and times. It also gives us a lot of reporting functions and we’re hoping it will save a lot of gas and wear and tear on the busses so they won’t need repairs as often,” Conaway said. “It’s a benefit to the client because it is a more on time scheduling.”
Conaway said he’s still manually managing the scheduling for now but eventually the entire routing system will be automatic.
“Once we work out the tweaks in it, we think it’s (going to be) a great system. It’s easy to communicate,” Conaway said. “I think all in all it’s exactly what we expected it to be. It’s been doing a great job.”