COORDINATION AS A STRATEGY FOR SERVING THE TRANSPORTATION DISADVANTAGED A Comparative Framework of Local and State Roles

Given many public services previously delivered by federal and state entities continue to devolve to more local levels of service delivery and programmatic control, interorganizational coordination serves as an approach for the public sector to ensure that services are efficiently delivered in a nonduplicative manner. This article explores the issue of coordination by examining three different policy approaches toward local coordination of transportation services for the transportation disadvantaged. Local transportation services for the disadvantaged are often delivered by a variety of nonprofit organizations, operated independently by multiple entities in a community, and result in duplicative, overlapping, and uncoordinated services. The analysis concludes that although coordination sounds like an easy and magical policy solution to be effective, state-level policies must, at a minimum, target and fund the coordination process. Differing examples of how this goal is to be reached, along with an exploration of state-level and local-level activities, are presented.