What’s Next for Transportation Coordination After a Year of COVID-19 Vaccine Access Work.
May 3, 2022
In coordination with the King County COVID Vaccine Mobility Task Force and the Regional Alliance for Resilient and Equitable Transportation, Hopelink has recently put together The COVID-19 Pandemic Response Summary Report detailing action taken by our team and partners to reduce transportation barriers and provide access to COVID-19 vaccines.
The report is available for all to review. It details the Task Force, the Transportation Provider Network (TPN) pilot, and the Coordinated Vaccine Transportation Helpline. This includes data regarding Helpline callers and vaccine trips.
With the close of this year-long project, we wanted to make sure that we took the time to document and digest all the lessons we learned together with our partners. These lessons are:
- Mobility and Transportation Advocates need to connect with decision-makers early in the planning process. Transportation is often an invisible barrier, an invisible resource. The advocacy for reducing barriers and elevating accessible options needs to happen as soon as possible.
- Transportation providers want clarity and to meet the needs of community members. Coordination efforts such as the TPN need to have clear definitions for participants. Partners need to know what they are saying yes to, and the appropriate point-of-contact for each program needs to be bought into the project and its vision.
- There is a strong desire from community members for same-day services. Many of the callers who connected with the Helpline gave less than 36-hour notice and wanted assurance of a ride quickly. The desire for same-day and the quick turnaround limited options and often removed many otherwise well-fitting programs from consideration. The need for long advance notice and strict jurisdictional boundaries frequently presented barriers to connecting a caller to a specialized transportation provider. As the pandemic continued and labor shortages increased, there was a particular constraint on specialized and volunteer transportation providers. Fewer drivers led to a greater reliance on for-profit options.
- All mobilization efforts detailed in this report and their successes were predicated on the existence of strong communication networks. This is perhaps the truest for the situational awareness updates. The King County Task Force was a possibility because of the groundwork laid out by the years of coordination done by King County Mobility Coalition membership and the three-county Regional Alliance for Resilient and Equitable Transportation. In emergency scenarios such as this pandemic, consistent communication is key.
As a next step for this coordination work, project team members will be presenting at the May RARET Workgroup meeting. We will review ridership data and opportunities for future collaboration.
Many of these lessons feed directly into current and future projects, like the Central Puget Sound One-Call/One-Click and RARET’s Emergency Transportation Provider Network, and the continued coordination offered by the King County Mobility Coalition network. These projects, and our coalition, are rooted in coordination and collaboration. While our direct COVID-19 vaccine work is over for now, the work towards a community where people can move freely throughout the region continues.
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Stories Shape Systems
What is Find a Ride Phase 2? Hopelink Mobility is currently developing the Phase 2 of our One-Call/One-Click program, Find a Ride . Find a Ride already serves as a comprehensive database of transit and specialized transportation services across King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties, along with a trip planner that incorporates those services. In Phase 2, we plan to expand this program by creating a way for Find a Ride users to check their eligibility for several of these services at once. To learn more about Find a Ride Phase 2, read the Find a Ride Phase 2 Readiness blog post or this document explaining the project! Hack for Social Impact Hack for Social Impact is, in their own words, “A 501(c)(3) tech non-profit organization dedicated to solving real-world challenges by connecting engineers and data scientists with non-profits, NGOs, and civic organizations.” Their flagship event is an annual hackathon where nonprofits bring live technology problems for participants to tackle. In April 2026, Hack for Social Impact hosted a hackathon in Seattle in partnership with the Women in Tech Regatta . Hopelink brought Find a Ride Phase 2 as a challenge for the participants, asking them to find a way to streamline eligibility determination processes and applications for transportation services in the Puget Sound Region. More details on this challenge, and our vision for Phase 2, can be find in the Find a Ride “Hack-Pack.” Outputs: Two teams took on the Find a Ride Phase 2 challenge and dedicated several hours to reimagining how people across the Puget Sound region enroll in specialized transportation services. Each took their own unique approach to developing a framework for Phase 2. Hopelink Team - This team focused on the rider experience from intake to approval. Their solution centers on a single application that instantly shows users which services they qualify for, complete with match scores and plain-language explanations for any services they don't qualify for. Key features include: Instant eligibility checking with a match score for each available service One centralized application submitted to individual services for review Upfront document requirements so riders know what they need before they apply Admin dashboard for Hopelink staff to manage vendors, track applications, and access data insights — such as why users declined certain services Client-side application tracker for services with longer approval timelines RideReady Team – This team took a bigger-picture approach, tackling the fragmentation across the nonprofit rideshare landscape. Rather than improving one intake flow, they proposed a statewide verification platform — verify your eligibility once with Hopelink, then use that credential to access dozens of partner organizations, much like logging into a website with your Google account. Key features include: "Verify once, use everywhere" — a single sign-on model compatible with partner rideshare organizations across Washington state Multi-language support — 6 languages available on the web interface, and 57 via a built-in voice chat assistant Voice chat assistant designed for accessibility, particularly for elderly riders and non-English speakers Results: The RideReady team won the Hackathon with their vision of Find a Ride Phase 2! Click here to see the site that they created. This site is a prototype and is meant to serve as proof of concept. The Find a Ride team will be taking insights into consideration from both projects as we develop Phase 2 but will ultimately continue to prioritize input from our partners. What made this hackathon so valuable wasn't just the quality of individual solutions — it was seeing two different teams independently confirm that the same core problems need solving: too much repeated data entry, unclear eligibility, and barriers that make accessing transportation harder than it needs to be. The ideas these teams prototyped, along with feedback from our dedicated partners, will inform how we shape Find a Ride Phase 2. We're grateful to Hack for Social Impact, the Women in Tech Regatta, and every participant who brought their expertise to this challenge. Stay tuned for more updates as Phase 2 continues to take shape! To learn more about Find a Ride Phase 2, read the Find a Ride Phase 2 Readiness blog post on the KCMobility website or join us at a Find a Ride Advisory meeting! For an invite, reach out to Grace Georgitsis at ggeorgitsis@hopelink.org, or by phone at 425-625-6836.
Thursday, May 21st 5:00-8:00pm, North Bend City Hall
With the support of two vendors, Anthro-Tech and Cambridge Systematics, and incorporating feedback from our Mobility Team, various Mobility Coalition Partners and individuals with disabilities, we are excited to bring you an updated version of Find a Ride.
Your Story Matters
Read the full 10-page report here: RARET Flooding 2025 Transportation Report
The Find a Ride Communications Toolkit contains information to share on your social media channels and to promote Find a Ride’s Trip Planner throughout Puget Sound at in-person events.
Phase 2 seeks to streamline rules and procedures for rider intake, eligibility determination, and enrollment verification in Puget Sound
SVMC hosted a Rural Transporation Advocacy 101 Workshop on June 13th, 2025
Downstream Transportation Impacts of Medicaid Cuts & Changes, July 2025