Amy Rynell, executive director of the Chicago-based Active Transportation Alliance, said the collar counties’ fledgling dial-a-ride services have demonstrated that spending on public transit can be effective in suburban or even rural areas.

“There’s a lot of interest in the dial-a-ride networks that have been built, but they have all these shortcomings because they’re really insular,” Rynell said.

‘So kind’

In each of the three counties, the dial-a-ride services initially launched as hyperlocal programs in specific towns or cities. In recent years, the counties have largely consolidated the programs into countywide services.

“Having these fragmented township-led services makes it very difficult on the rider,” said Mike Klemens, manager of transportation planning with the Lake County Division of Transportation. “… So there was a desire to get a more unified, coordinated service.”

Lake County collected about $41 million from the RTA sales tax and spent about $850,000 to maintain Ride Lake County last year, budget records show.

The service now averages more than 40,000 trips a year, with an average trip length of 6 miles, Klemens said. While trips are available seven days a week, rides run only between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. and must be booked at least two hours in advance. Eligibility is limited to people with disabilities and people 60 and older.

The program charges a flat rate by distance: $2 for rides up to 5 miles, $4 up to 10 miles and $6 for rides beyond that.

“The program has been very popular,” Klemens said. Federal law requires ADA paratransit to serve certified riders within three-quarters of a mile of fixed route transit, but much of the collar counties are not covered under that, Klemens noted.

Bromir, a blind services advocate at the Lake County Center for Independent Living, said the Ride Lake County program helps her get her daughter to daycare so that she can go to work.

“My daughter loves riding the buses, and the drivers are outstanding. They are so kind,” Bromir said.

Bromir, however, believes the program can’t meet the current demand, and she’s only able to get a ride about half of the time that she tries to schedule one.

Mark Ehlert, who has total loss of vision, said he has used Ride Lake County to schedule rides for work and errands, such as going to the grocery store. “It’s pretty amazing. They send you a whole bus, like a rock-star van,” he said.

At the same time, having to schedule a ride in advance limits spontaneity, he said. Now, he uses the Rideshare Access Program (RAP), which subsidizes rideshare services like Uber for ADA-certified residents. “If I want to go grab a cheeseburger, I can just go grab an Uber and there’s no time limit or anything,” he said.

The RAP program became so popular after its 2024 launch that it opened up a budget gap that RTA leaders had to fill by pulling from their paratransit fund, according to the agency.

For people who come to the Lake County Center for Independent Living, Paus said greater access to reliable transit would increase their ability to go to doctors appointments and find jobs and housing. “It would bring a sense of maybe relief knowing that there’s something always available to them,” she said.

‘Hit or miss’

McHenry County, by far the smallest and most rural of the six counties in the RTA region, is the only collar county that offers a dial-a-ride transit service to its entire population, not just seniors and people with disabilities.

The county last year spent $2.2 million, or about 13% of its RTA sales tax revenue, to help fund its dial-a-ride program MCRide, records show.

The efforts are necessary in a county with scant bus and train service, said Scott Hennings, assistant director of transportation for the McHenry County Division of Transportation.

The program provided over 100,000 rides a year pre-pandemic and is on pace to complete more than 80,000 rides this year. It’s also struggling to keep up with demand. Pace provides about 35 buses for the program, but Hennings said he wishes there were more.

“We’re by far the smallest county in the region, but we had the program with the highest ridership,” Hennings said, adding, “People have no other option.”

Riders pay a base fare for the first 5 miles of travel (either $4 or $2 depending on the user) plus $0.25 for each additional mile.

Moeller, manager of the McHenry County PADS homeless shelter, said the MCRide program is “hit or miss.” When she tries to schedule a ride for a client, it works out “probably about only 50% of the time,” she said.

“When the dial-a-ride and call-per-ride works, it’s perfect. It runs seamlessly,” Moeller said.

One client who could not drive used MCRide to attend drug court every Friday afternoon and successfully completed the program, Moeller said. Another used the service to get to work at a warehouse. A current client uses the service to go to counseling services, she said.

Other clients can’t stick with their jobs because there are no transit services to return them home late at night, outside of operating hours. Some have been dropped off hours before an appointment or picked up hours later, and it ends up taking a whole day to get to a 15-minute doctor’s appointment, she said.

“Sometimes it’s hard to get somebody on the phone. Sometimes they don’t answer,” she said. Moeller said she has woken up at 6 a.m. to try to schedule a ride a couple days out. In the past, she’s had to call again a few hours later. “You have to keep trying to get it until there’s a route, and you’re just kind of holding on, hoping,” she said.

If a client has a chance to get housing in another county, the shelter tries to schedule those meetings by Zoom instead of subjecting someone to multiple bus transfers. “It’s too confusing,” Moeller said.

Back to the bus

In Kane County, Laura Graf steps out of her St. Charles home every Sunday, walks down the driveway and climbs onto a small bus. It takes her directly to church – too far to walk but only an eight-minute drive.

“It comes to my door. It takes me to where I’m going. For five bucks, I can’t beat it,” Graf said.

Graf started using the Ride in Kane program after her car broke down in June. She used Uber a few times to get around town, but it was too expensive. She has also used the Pace On-Demand system, but that program allows her to travel only within St. Charles and Geneva. When she needs to go elsewhere in the county, or on Sunday when that system doesn’t operate, she uses the Ride in Kane service.

“It saves me a lot of money because I haven’t bought a car. And it makes me feel better environmentally,” said Graf, who grows native plants on her lawn. “This is one more thing to do to help.”

Transit is scarce in Kane County, and many people don’t own cars, said Janet Harris, recently program manager for Ride in Kane. Meanwhile, the county’s population is growing — and aging.

“What I’m seeing and what I’m hearing is a dynamic shift right now that people want to go back to public transportation,” Kane County Chairperson Corinne Pierog said in a Senate transportation committee hearing late last year.

Ride in Kane serves residents with a disability and 65 and older, at a rate of $5 for the first 10 miles and $2 for every mile beyond that. A temporary grant through the American Rescue Plan Act has also allowed the program to serve veterans.

More than 400 people use the service consistently each month, and the program has nearly 10,000 registered riders, with about 44 new registered riders per month. In the first half of 2025, the program averaged 5,000 rides monthly, with an average trip length of 5 miles.

“Numbers are always growing in enrollment and also ridership,” Harris said. At the same time, the number of rides provided went down this year after the program lost a federal grant, the Job Access Reverse Commute (JARC) Grant, Harris said.

After Pace subsidizes half of the operating costs, the rest of the funding comes from federal grants and contributions from Kane County and more than a dozen municipalities. The county spent about $300,000 for its contributions last year, backed by its share of the RTA sales tax.

Depending on where residents live in Kane County, trips may be available only for a specific purpose, such as medical, work or social. People who live in Elgin, for example, can schedule rides for medical, work and social purposes. But residents of Pingree Grove can take only trips for medical purposes — not for work or a social event.

Harris said it’s hard for her to field calls from residents when different addresses face different limitations. Ideally, Harris said, the program would have a coordinated countywide system with no limitations on trips — and the ability to travel beyond the county.

A regional approach to dial-a-ride?

Riders across the region have complained about the limitations of county-run transit services that generally stop at county lines. County leaders have also acknowledged the frustrations of running fractured services.

DuPage and Will counties also operate their own dial-a-ride programs, but they do not fund them through the RTA sales tax.

“People’s trips don’t stop at county boundaries. And right now, it’s very difficult to get across county boundaries,” Klemens said, adding, “Having a more regional approach to dial-a-ride — especially one that people could make single-vehicle trips where they don’t have to transfer vehicles — would be very, very beneficial to riders.”

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has called on the state to strengthen on-demand transit service with improved coordination, integration and governance. The agency’s 2023 Plan of Action for Regional Transit said the state “should both require and fund the integration of demand-responsive programs at a larger geographic scale.”

County officials, however, have pushed back on consolidation.

“People that live out here, work out here, talk with the residents out here — we know what the people need,” said Hennings of the McHenry County Department of Transportation.

The bill that passed the Senate this spring directs a third party to evaluate existing dial-a-ride programs and make recommendations for coordinated service across the region, with the possibility of standardized hours of operation, rider eligibility, criteria and fares.

Any future system will likely need to maintain “realistic boundaries,” said Pace Executive Director Melinda Metzger. She predicted it would be infeasible for a new combined agency to offer a single continuous ride from one end of the region to the other.

Still, the addition of new funding — whether it’s from the RTA tax, or another form — would be a boon to the fixed-route buses, dial-a-ride services and paratransit that Pace can offer the region’s aging population, Metzger said.

“Demand has grown on every single system we have,” she said. “We serve rural communities, we serve urban communities and everywhere in between. We can’t do it all. But we want to do more.”