It’s been an hour since Alma Cordova of Brodheadsville was supposed to be picked up by the Pocono Pony at West End Physical Therapy in Kresgeville.

She calls the Monroe County Transit Authority. The problem was that the service got mixed up about where the driver dropped her off. The driver went instead to the new St. Luke’s facility on Route 715.

They said they were waiting in the lot where they dropped her off.

“No, you’re wrong,” she told them. “I don’t know why there is this mix-up.”

After two hours of waiting, Cordova finally gets picked up and heads home.

While the mix-up may have been an oddity, the extended wait time is nothing new to Pony riders.

Lifeline turns inconvenient

Monroe County Transit Authority’s Shared Ride Program is a major lifeline to many county residents, allowing them to get to and from medical appointments, as well as the grocery store and other destinations. While it is beneficial that such a spread-out area has this mass transit option, the Pony has some glaring flaws, according to riders.

Lengthy wait times are more than an inconvenience, and almost an expectation for those who use the Pony to get out to dialysis clinics such as Fresenius Kidney Care in East Stroudsburg. It even affects the patients’ medical service.

“Oh, it’s horrible,” dialysis tech Siree Allsop said. “Every patient that takes it at our clinic has complaints. When they bring them here late, some of our patients have to cut their treatment short.”

And while gripes with pickup times on the way to an appointment are an accepted nuisance, it’s the ride back that seems to be the big issue.

“It’s totally ridiculous when we get on that bus to go home. Sometimes I have to be on the bus for three or four hours before I get home. There are times when I don’t get home till 8 o’clock at night, ” Ron Seemon of Pocono Lake said.

Allsop said he sees numerous patients forced to hang around the clinic waiting on a ride home.

“They already spend at least five hours a day in dialysis. It’s like abuse to have them wait six hours for transportation,” he said.

MCTA’s challenges

Rich Schlameuss, assistant executive director of the MCTA, said the root of the problem is being a cost-effective service that isn’t built to make money.

“We get complaints because the scheduling might not have been done the way they would have done it,” he said. “It’s a challenge. I get it, especially if you’re going to a doctor’s appointment and you have to sit there for a while. I sympathize. But it doesn’t take away from the core constraint where we have to stay on target and stay on budget.”

Funding for programs like Shared Ride are derived from the state lottery, contributions from the Agency on Aging, and a very small fee from the riders themselves.

Schlameuss said, on average, a one-way ride will cost from about $1 to $7.50, at most. The service is set to offer the most it can while breaking even.

When it comes down to the nuts and bolts of making that budget work, the problems become more apparent.

Imagine covering an area of 617 square miles, not counting outer-region trips, and having to synchronize routes to maintain maximum efficiency. The key, especially for drivers who are taking patients to medical services, is to get them there on time.

“Especially in places like the West End, there is a lot of space between people. It takes more time to get to people and pick them up. There’s a lot of distance between the pickups,” Schlameuss said.

“Our focus is to get everyone to their appointment on time. We’re a little more flexible about getting them home on time. Sometimes you may wait a little bit longer to get home.”

Plotting routes

To make it happen, the MCTA relies on Ecolane, program that plots out routes based on input from dispatchers and Ride Share users. Ecolane plots out the routes based on groups of people around a particular geocode, or geographic location. It arranges pickups in that location based on the most logical, timesaving route it can plot.

The software also allows for real-time tracking of the buses, so riders can check the general location of their bus on the MCTA website.

However, even a sophisticated program such as this is subject to the whims of chance, including construction, traffic delays and weather issues. This is on top of maintaining an up-to-date schedule right to the point of departure for the route, and sometimes even along the way.

“There’s a number of challenges that we have each day. We have to schedule for the next day, and we may have cancellations that make the system reroute,” Schlameuss said.

According to Schlameuss, drivers are able to communicate with dispatchers to make route changes, say, in order to pick up Tom before Nancy so that the bus won’t have to backtrack.

Inconvenienced riders

Ask the riders, however, and they’ll tell you that this is rarely the case.

“Sometimes when I get on the bus, they go all over the countryside when they pass by where I get dropped off,” Cynthia Werkheiser of Stroudsburg said.

Dialysis patient Gerald Dossantos, who lives in Tobyhanna, went through a similar experience.

“They dropped someone off two blocks away from my house, then they drive 15 minutes away before they drop me off,” he said. “It really blows your mind.”

Waiting upward of an hour or two for a ride home isn’t a rare occurrence, though again, it’s at the behest of the system. Would it be more convenient to send a bus out right after a few patients are ready to go? Certainly for them, but it may not be efficient enough for the MCTA.

Imagine a trip where some patients of West End Physical Therapy are looking to get home in Stroudsburg. In order to make the ride work in the favor of the MCTA, the Pony can’t take off until there are enough riders to justify the expense. If just two people are headed in that direction, it works out better to wait until three or four other patients who have homes along the way are ready to go.

Schlameuss said the MCTA is bound by the standard of efficiency. More buses would cost more money. Fixed routes for the Shared Ride program would invalidate the convenience for someone who may have a variable schedule.

But Allsop said, “I don’t see any efforts to improve service or accommodate these patients.”

Theodore Fenstermaker of Effort said his wife, Anna, who uses a walker and relies on the Pony to get to dialysis treatments, was once abandoned by the bus. Fenstermaker said that a driver got a call to pick up other customers and left Anna with a promise that another bus would be there to get her soon. She waited for nearly two hours before it arrived.

“These people don’t know how to route buses,” he said.

Long wait times and inconveniences just seem like the name of the game in public transportation, though Schlameuss said that he can sympathize with the riders.

“I can truly understand the frustrations of folks when things don’t go the way they expect them to,” he said.

Rep. Jack Rader’s office has taken complaints from constituents about the Pony.

“Every time I have called, they’ve been responsive,” Nancy Parks said.

But Riders are looking for a solution.

“There’s no reason to spend three or four hours on the bus after four hours on the dialysis machine,” Seemon said. “Something’s going to have to change with that bus company, because that’s the only way I can get down there.”