Improvements coming to Edmonton’s accessible transit service, following audit

February 19, 2025 Canuck

Edmonton’s city auditor has made eight recommendations to improve the effectiveness of the city’s paratransit service, saying clients who rely on the service will benefit from the changes.

The Office of the City Auditor found Edmonton Transit Service (ETS) partially met the goal of managing Dedicated Accessible Transit Service (DATS) effectively and efficiently.

DATS, which had a budget of $32 million for 2024, provides door-to-door public transit service for people with physical or cognitive disabilities that prevent them from using conventional transit.

A recent audit report found ETS could improve the service’s eligibility assessment process, privacy controls, contract management practices, strategic planning, data quality and training.

Members of city council’s audit committee discussed the report at a meeting on Tuesday morning.

“Continuously improving the effectiveness of DATS will help ETS to better fulfil DATS’ mission of providing industry-leading, sustainable and rider-focused paratransit service to the Edmonton community,” the report said.

The report said DATS has several strengths, including a clearly defined mission, with 93 per cent of trips taken in 2023 being delivered on time, but the service should address weak privacy controls affecting some city employees, update training materials and improve data quality and contract management.

According to the audit, DATS was monitoring whether contractors met some performance standards, but was not penalizing those that came up short.

The audit also uncovered invoicing errors, one of which resulted in the city underpaying a contractor by approximately $40,000.

Two of the recommendations related to the service improving strategic planning, with the audit report saying DATS lacks clear goals, targets, a formal risk assessment and service model review.

While the audit report said many aspects of the DATS team’s eligibility assessment process followed best practices, its procedures had not been updated since 2018 and staff were not using them.

The auditor recommended ETS update and use documented assessment guidelines for making eligibility decisions — and formally review decisions — to ensure DATS provides fair and consistent access to people who need it.

Recommendations accepted

Keri McEachern, advocacy manager at the Self Advocacy Federation, said DATS riders are happy with the service’s new online booking tool and customer service, but driver training remains an improvement area.

She said riders have reported being told they cannot bring groceries and packages on board.

“Not everybody has regular interactions with people with disabilities,” she said.

ETS has accepted all of the auditor’s recommendations.

“All the actions associated with the recommendations are completely feasible to be done by the end of this year and many of them are underway already,” Craig McKeown, acting deputy city manager of the city operations department, told the audit committee.

Union concerns

One of the recommendations says ETS should regularly review DATS’ service model to optimize value for money and service quality.

That recommendation worries Steve Bradshaw, president of Local 569 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents city DATS workers.

“We’re seeing a hint there that they’re getting at more contracted service and that’s a concern for us,” he told CBC News.

DATS operations are currently split 50-50 between city and contracted employees.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Mayor Amarjeet Sohi warned against pursuing more privatization.

“I used to work at DATS and I have seen how privatization actually can lead to erosion of service and [it] has taken decades for us to be where we are today,” he said.

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