Compassion, Safety Drive TARTA Mobility Specialists

TARTA Move Mobility Specialist Vanessa Valencia grew up watching her mother use a public paratransit service, which gave her a good idea of what was made possible by the people behind it.

“We really did depend on it, but it wasn’t just as a ride somewhere,” Valencia said. “The people she worked with genuinely cared and treated her with respect, and that made everything easier.”

Vanessa and fellow Mobility Specialist Jeremy Fofrich bring the same approach to their work at TARTA Move, and providing a path to independence for those who consider using the service is only part of what they do.

With the help of TARTA’s own Mobility Management team in addition to community partners like the Ability Center, the Lucas County Board of Developmental Disabilities, the Area Office on Aging and so many more, the Mobility Specialists can identify other ways to help.

“We always try to keep a focus on safety, what’s safe and what’s not for an individual passenger, because everyone we see is going to have very different, very specific needs,” Fofrich said. “It’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all approach. From the kind of vehicles we use to our drivers, we want to be intentional about providing safety and compassion according to individual needs.

“We have a great group of community partners and we couldn’t do this without them. The service organizations we work with are able to give us information on what each client needs and tell us how else we can help.”

Applications for paratransit service can be submitted in person at TARTA offices or online, and includes both the passenger’s information and information from their medical professional regarding their qualifying disability to ride paratransit service. Potential passengers are then transported to TARTA Move at 130 Knapp Street in Toledo, where an in-person assessment is conducted.

While the purpose of that intake meeting is to determine if a passenger is eligible to ride TARTA Move, that isn’t the only thing that TARTA’s Mobility Specialists are looking for.

“We try to help however we can, and that isn’t going to be limited to whether or not we can take them from one place to another,” Valencia said. “We want to match up what they need with what we can offer and see what else we can do.

“There are so many resources available in our area from so many great organizations, and sometimes the people we’re working with just aren’t aware of them.”

Recently, those referrals have included directing potential clients to where they can find medical and dental services, connecting them to food banks or mental health resources, and more.

The attention to detail displayed by the Mobility Specialists matters even more as need increases. TARTA Move and its third party provider, Via, completed more than 120,000 paratransit trips in 2025, and ridership is up four percent in the first four months of this year.

“We’re just trying to help them any way we can, even outside of the services TARTA itself can provide,” Fofrich said. “The need for this service is always growing, the needs of this community are always changing, so we change with it. It feels good to help people connect to their community when before they may have been unable to do that.”

TARTA Move provides an American Sign Language interpreter for those who need one, and alternative scheduling methods for nonverbal clients. TARTA’s Mobility Management team also worked with The Sight Center of Northwest Ohio to acquire devices that help low-vision clients read the application and other paperwork, through a federal grant.

“I think the most rewarding part of what we do is being able to help people gain some level of independence,” Valencia said. “Our passengers need to places that most of us take for granted, and this service becomes a very important part of their lives."