Public Transit options and aging, disabled are connected in quality of life choices. Pace’s Dial-a-Ride service's | May 2, 2012

Costly Commute: Keep moving
Downers Grove senior opts for Pace Dial-a-Ride to stay active —
at $10 a round trip

By Janice Hoppe, jhoppe@mysuburbanlife.com
Suburban Life Publications
May 02, 2012

Downers Grove, IL - After leaving Chicago and moving into a retirement home in Downers Grove, Florence Schubert’s biggest challenge was finding transportation.

Now, it’s the cost to get around town.

{photo: Florence Schubert of Downers Grove has been using the Pace Dial-a-Ride system since moving to town 12 years ago. Door-to-door rides made by reservation are available to seniors and the disabled in Downers Grove Township. snapshots.mysuburbanlife.com/1456431}

For more than a decade, Schubert, 88, has been using Pace’s Dial-a-Ride service through Downers Grove Township. Every Thursday morning at 9:30, Schubert leaves her third-floor apartment to wait for the bus to pick her up from her home, where she then travels to Jewel on Ogden Avenue for her weekly grocery shopping.

Hopefully, her favorite driver, Hayward Carter, is working that morning — he helps with her load when she’s done shopping.

“It’s a ritual with me,” Schubert said.

Subsidized from Pace and the township, Dial-a-Ride is restricted to riders who are age 65 or older and registered with the township. The cost to travel is $5, one way.

Because of her limited, Social Security-based income, Schubert only rides once a week. If she goes out on other days, she walks to where she needs to go. On weekends, a family member picks her up.

Schubert is one of more than 600 seniors in the township who are registered for Dial-a-Ride’s curb-to-curb special transportation, which travels anywhere within Downers Grove Township boundaries, said Joan Nichols, township office manager.

While Schubert said she thinks the program is great for seniors who don’t own cars or can’t drive anymore, she wouldn’t mind making a couple changes.

“I think it’s a lot for the route I take and they only give you an hour, and that’s not a lot of time if you are shopping,” Schubert said. “If you stop and look at lipstick, a half-hour can already go by.”

A former beautician, Schubert moved from the South Side of Chicago to Downers Grove when she retired 12 years ago. After going to trade school in the city to learn how to do hair, she lived nearly her whole life there.

Though Downers Grove is different from her old lifestyle in Chicago, Schubert still manages to get out on the town by walking to St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, 4832 Highland Ave., almost every Sunday. She also walks to the Downers Grove train station on Main Street to get to her doctor appointments in Berwyn, and rides for free through a Metra program.

“I never owned a car and I came from Chicago, where we had everything there,” Schubert said. “Here, you can’t even walk to get a gallon of milk.”
Even though having a car in the suburbs would give her much more freedom — if she could still drive at her age — Schubert said the gas, for one, and the cost to maintain a vehicle is just too much.
“I can’t afford to drive the car if something goes wrong with it,” she said. “It’s so expensive to own a car.”


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http://www.mysuburbanlife.com/glenellyn/topstories/x1942600960/Costly-Commute-Keep-moving

This is the third in mysuburbanlife.com - multi-part series on the “Costly Commute.” Each week, we feature your stories — how you’re coping with the price of gas, what you’re doing differently — ahead of the possible $5 peak we may see this summer, as well as offer expert advice on how to cut costs.