When you rely on the state’s Mobility system for transportation, you can often feel like the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

I am one of about 16,500 regular Mobility users. And until recently, I and others had lamented about the woefully inadequate paratransit service.

While I’m not shy about making noise about vehicles that arrive well beyond the promised 30-minute window, or don’t show up at all, others have suffered more quietly. Beaten down by the unfulfilled promise of a 24-7-365 service, they roll with this as just one of many indignities endured by people whose walking, talking, hearing, seeing and communicating can render them both invisible and insignificant.

Problems loomed well before anyone had ever heard of COVID-19. But the pandemic didn’t help.

You’d make your reservations, be given a pickup time with a 30-minute arrival window — and then wait. You’d feel a sense of anger, frustration and “Yay, I won the lottery” when a vehicle showed up.

In the summer of 2021, Mobility recorded its worst on-time performance in more than five years. Around that time WBAL-TV’s Barry Simms reported on riders waiting for hours, missing medical appointments, missing work and, in the case of one woman, having to sleep outside when a Mobility bus dropped her off after the curfew at the shelter where she lived.

The problem, it seemed — well, one of them anyway — was a lack of drivers. That same shortage at Mobility left the backup system that some of us riders use, i.e., subsidized taxis, just as reliably useless. I lost track of the number of times when after I had waited three to eight hours for a cab, I’d get a call from a driver asking, “Do you still need a taxi?”

This sucked to high heaven, or as the MTA’s Holly Arnold says of the agency that she assumed leadership of in June 2021: “It was lousy. We were not providing a quality service to our riders. Folks were having to wait too long, in some cases hours at a time. The time on the vehicles was too long. And then whenever they were trying to call to get assistance, that wait was often too long.”

By this past summer I noticed a change that carried over into the fall: In addition to its fleet of buses and cars, Mobility was using a service that was its own version of Uber and Lyft. Called UZURV, it uses private drivers who’ve been vetted. Riders were notified of the names of drivers and sent their profiles, along with the color, make and model of their cars — and alerts about when a vehicle would be pulling up. With this combination of options, wait times dropped, as confidence rose that Mobility was on the way.

That was balm, but the dramatic change — the break-out-the-sparkling-cider change — came in February. That’s when MTA debuted its Mobility All Access app. Now you can make reservations more easily over a longer span of time and have some certainty of when to expect your vehicle. And as you follow its progress toward your pickup spot, you even know the vehicle number. Unless you’ve experienced waiting in inclement weather because you’re afraid of missing a vehicle that may or may not be on its way and you can’t reach anyone at the Mobility phone line to find out for sure – well, let’s just say that the notice available in this new app is a big deal.

Arnold says that the app was about 18 months in the making and grew out of telling her team to let the ideas fly. “We’re going to throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks here,” she recalls saying. Led by Josh Wolf, the Mobility director, the team apparently did just that and brought in an advocacy group, Disability Rights Maryland, for input along the way.

So far, so good. More drivers. More drivers on time. Even more drivers with pleasant demeanors. There have always been drivers who’ve gone out of their way to assist passengers who by virtue of being Mobility clients are likely to need some sort of help. But there have been plenty of grumps who specialize in being unresponsive as they hit every pothole dotting Baltimore’s streets.

“Our Mobility operators are not just driving the vehicles,” Arnold observes. “They are going door to door, helping people get on the bus, get off the bus, providing that extra care and assistance and, in many cases, sometimes being the only person or couple of people that a rider is talking to in a given day. So they are kind of therapists and everything else, as well as operating the vehicle.”

More parts of the system seem to be running smoothly. In fact, for January and February, on-time performance is reportedly about 95 percent. There are still glitches, however. Twice in the span of a couple of weeks last month, I was on a bus more than 1.5 hours, getting from Morgan State University to my home about seven miles away. Other riders were picked up and dropped off before my turn came, necessitating restroom breaks at stops along the way.

Arnold said that one of her priorities in 2023 is to reduce the amount of time any passenger is on a vehicle. If it takes her 25 minutes on a fixed-route bus to get from home to work, it shouldn’t take more than that for Mobility along a similar route, she says. Arnold rides a city bus when she takes her 7-year-old daughter to public school, and one to her office as well. Recently she rode light rail to Annapolis to testify at a legislative hearing, then took a commuter bus home.

“I’m a transit believer and a transit lover,” she says. “To be able to work with buses and trains and people who use them is pretty cool.”

So is having someone in charge who not only sees us, but listens to us, too.

ER.shipp@thebaltimorebanner.com

E.R. Shipp is a veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. She is also currently an associate professor at Morgan State University.