Riders and Drivers Urge TransLink to Bring HandyDart In-House

Thousands of people with disabilities could end up stranded in the coming weeks across Metro Vancouver as strike action by ATU Local 1724 ramps up.

The union represents HandyDart drivers, maintenance workers, road supervisors, trainers and office workers in Metro Vancouver and has been on strike since July 3 when an overwhelming majority of members voted in favour of taking action, said union president Joe McCann.

This does not impact HandyDart services outside of Metro Vancouver.

HandyDart offers a “paratransit” service for people who can’t take conventional public transit without assistance due to physical, sensory or cognitive disabilities. Drivers offers passengers door-to-door service and are trained to work with people with a range of disabilities and mobility aides, McCann said. Passengers can book a ride up to a week in advance and pay the same fare as conventional public transit users. They will often ride the bus with several other passengers.

Leo Yu, a HandyDart bus operator and member of Local 1724, says working conditions have been deteriorating over the past decade. More recently, “completely chaotic” workdays have been negatively impacting drivers, dispatchers, passengers and their caregivers, he says.

Some passengers are waiting hours to be picked up or are getting stuck on the bus for an hour longer than they were expecting, which requires caregivers to pick up the slack, he says. Stressed-out dispatchers change drivers’ schedules every hour, leading to confusion and frustration on all sides. And TransLink is increasingly relying on taxi drivers to fill service gaps, which leads to safety and accessibility concerns for passengers with intersecting vulnerabilities, Yu says.

This has led to a Metro Vancouver HandyDart staff annual turnover rate of 11 per cent, Yu says, compared to a 4.4 per cent staff turnover rate for TransLink drivers.

Beth McKellar, chair of the HandyDart Riders' Alliance, has been using HandyDart services for 20 years. She says she loves her bus drivers — but not the way the company is run.

To get a ride you have to wait on hold for 20 minutes before being able to speak with dispatch and you never know if it’s a bus or a taxi that will pick you up, she says. A taxi driver might not know how to help you get to the vehicle or help with your seatbelt the way a bus driver does, she says, which means passengers have to constantly advocate for their safety.

The passengers she worries about the most are chemotherapy and dialysis patients who might miss a pickup time at the hospital because their treatment ran long. They then have to wait for several hours for the next available ride.

“They’re so sick and just want to go home, not to wait three hours in the hospital for a ride,” McKellar said. “That’s just cruel.”

In 2023 TransLink provided 1,176,000 HandyDart trips to its 30,000 registered clients, according to its website.

McCann said Local 1724 has been meeting with Transdev since September 2023 and has been without a contract since Dec. 31, 2023, when their old contract expired.

McCann says Local 1724 is asking for a new contract, “fair” compensation, for TransLink to stop filling its service gaps with taxi rides and for TransLink to take over HandyDart operations.

TransLink currently outsources management of HandyDart to the for-profit corporation Transdev Canada, he says.

HandyDart employees are struggling to afford to live in the same city they work in, McCann said.

“They make 30 per cent less than conventional transit workers and 16 per cent less than HandyDart drivers in the Fraser Valley,” he said. “Workers can’t afford to keep working at a discount.”

A for-profit company will always prioritize profits over people, Yu said.

The Tyee contacted Transdev Canada to respond to criticism against it. In an emailed response a spokesperson declined to comment due to the active labour discussions. The company is under contract to TransLink to operate HandyDart until mid 2026. The contract was originally awarded to First Transit but was acquired by Transdev in October 2022 when Transdev took over First Transit.

“We’re supposed to be an extension of public transit,” Yu said. “Even if passengers wanted to take a regular city bus they’re not able to… and they often can’t pay for an Uber or taxi so [HandyDart] is the bare minimum option people have to get around.”

Transdev’s management contract ending in mid 2026 creates an opportunity for TransLink to bring HandyDart in-house and improve operations, Yu says.

McCann says “hopefully” Local 1724 and TransLink will come to an agreement during negotiations from July 29 to 31, but if not, a “full withdrawal of service could be imminent.”

He declined to give an exact date of when that could happen.

So far strike action has included refusing to wear uniforms and collect fairs. On July 29, this will escalate to refusing to pick up shifts on days off, and refusing to work overtime.

Bringing HandyDart in-house

Local 1724 isn’t the only voice calling for TransLink to take over the management of HandyDart.

The Save Our HandyDart coalition, made up of HandyDart users, seniors, caregivers, advocacy groups and labour unions, is also calling for B.C. to improve HandyDart services.

On their website they have a petition and open letter to Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure Rob Fleming and Minister of State for Infrastructure and Transit Dan Coulter with three calls to action.

They ask for the ministers to make TransLink limit the percentage of taxi trips it relies on for HandyDart services, to review the cost and benefit of managing HandyDart as an in-house or outsourced service, and for TransLink to bring HandyDart in-house.

Yu is an organizing member of the Save Our HandyDart coalition.

He says TransLink has committed to comparing the cost-benefit of continued outsourcing to insourcing using a Multiple Account Evaluation format, which he believes will make it clear that TransLink needs to make the paratransit service “a public and not privatized service.”

The Tyee contacted TransLink and asked how it could help reduce some of the “chaos” experienced by HandyDart drivers and passengers. In response a TransLink spokesperson pointed to an annual customer satisfaction survey where passengers rated the HandyDart service 8.6 out of 10 in 2023 and 8.5 out of 10 in 2022. TransLink also does an annual review of HandyDart operations, they said.

“TransLink is concerned about any impacts to HandyDart service,” the spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement. “HandyDart is an incredibly important service for thousands of customers who are unable to use the conventional transit system.”

What’s currently wrong with HandyDart

During the COVID-19 pandemic HandyDart cancelled all of its recurring pickup schedules, also called “subscribed rides,” McKellar said.

If a passenger wants to reapply for subscribed rides they have to wait 60 to 90 days after making the request, she added. In the meantime they have to call dispatch to request a ride, which can come with lengthy hold times.

Yu says dispatch starts the day with “hundreds” of unassigned trips and spends the rest of the day “constantly trying to fit” passengers into the itinerary in a “mad scramble.”

Dispatch is working on MS-DOS operating systems, which can be 20 to 40 years old and don’t have traffic mitigation technology, which means they can’t predict what routes will get drivers stuck in traffic, Yu says.

When a bus gets stuck in traffic and isn’t able to make a passenger pickup a taxi can be sent instead. The taxi ride is paid for by TransLink and passengers do not have to pay for the trip though they are occasionally pressured to tip for it, Yu said.

Yu said TransLink’s goal is to have less than seven per cent of all HandyDart rides completed by taxis. The latest available data, which covers January to May, shows that taxi rides have made up just under a quarter of all HandyDart rides this year.

“This is no longer a matter of dispatch saying there’s a broken-down bus today and we need to use a taxi,” Yu said. “Taxi drivers are given manifests of rides for the day — that’s not a supplemental taxi service anymore.”

Taxi drivers themselves aren’t the problem, Yu said, but the service they offer isn’t necessarily compatible with the needs of disabled passengers.

Taxis have lower seats and no handrails. Drivers might not be trained how to safely secure a wheelchair, and they often don’t know to or don’t want to help passengers walk from their front door to the vehicle, he said.

Because they deal with vulnerable populations, HandyDart drivers go through one month of training, complete a criminal record check and have a Class 4 license with a 10-year clean driving history, McCann said.

“They’re held accountable and they walk people from their door to the HandyDart,” McCann said. “These are often people who cannot be left alone and we’re entrusted to bring them somewhere or to someone who can take care of them.”

Taxi drivers treat everyone the same and that can mean they don’t know to take extra care when transporting disabled or mobility challenged passengers, said Jonathan Ascencio, a student at Kwantlen Polytechnic University who has been riding HandyDart for five years.

Ascencio suffered a stroke in his late 20s and relied on a member of his church to drive him to physiotherapy appointments for a year before discovering the paratransit service.

Ascencio says bus drivers will walk with him up his front steps and carry his walker for him. Taxi drivers almost never do this.

McKellar says she needs help getting to the vehicle and securing her seatbelt and has faced “surly” taxi drivers who have refused to help when she asks.

Yu says in another case a passenger with a cognitive impairment was dropped off by a taxi outside of her home without being walked to her door. She wandered off and it took a two-hour police search to locate her. Another time a passenger with a visual impairment was sent a taxi but the driver didn’t know to come to the passenger’s door and help guide him to the ride, leading to delays.

Delays also have racialized impacts because care workers and home support workers are disproportionately racialized and are the ones who have to pick up the slack when HandyDart isn’t able to keep on schedule, Yu says. “If we don’t show up they have to call [and pay for] a taxi or do extra time.”

Transdev has been doing some work to ensure patients with cognitive disabilities are picked up by HandyDart buses instead of taxis, Yu says. But if TransLink continues to outsource management of the service then a new company could come in, throwing out all of the old policies and protocols and introducing new ones, he says.

Ascencio and McKellar both praise the work done by HandyDart bus drivers.

Ascencio says drivers treat passengers with dignity and are always professional.

He remembers one time when a passenger with cognitive impairment had a toiletting accident on the bus. The driver did not shame the passenger and was “incredible in the way he managed the situation,” Ascencio said, getting the passenger safely home and then calling dispatch to notify them the bus needed to be taken out of service and cleaned.

You wouldn’t expect the same care and attention from a conventional bus driver, he said, and HandyDart deserve equitable payment.