Lyons Lift: accessible transportation
A new accessible on-campus transportation service for students, faculty and staff debuted this fall at Mount Holyoke College.
This fall, Mount Holyoke College debuted Lyons Lift, an accessible on-campus transportation service for students, faculty and staff with temporary or permanent conditions that affect their mobility.
The service operates one wheelchair-accessible minivan with a manual ramp and one row of seating and replaces contracted services for accessible on-campus transportation.
Grace Tatian, Lyons Lift supervisor, oversees student staffing and training, van maintenance, ride and passenger administration and more. While this is a new role, Tatian is very familiar with accessible transportation and previously worked as the supervisor of Accessible Van Services at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“I started as a student as an [accessible van] driver, and I did that for about two years,” they said. “I became a dispatcher and a trainer, and UMass Transit has this really cool program where all of their departments have student staff employees. So it’s an opportunity for students to get administrative experience, and they work closely under a full-time staff member. I spent a year doing that. It was a co-supervisor position, but it was incredibly similar to what I’m doing here.”
Tatian is also familiar with the Five College Consortium. They started at Mount Holyoke College in 2019, took a gap year in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and then transferred to UMass, where they earned their degree in sociology.
“You know, being able to do this, it was a fusion of two different eras of my life: my life as a Mount Holyoke student and my life as an accessible van services supervisor at UMass,” Tatian said.
Tatian aims to build a strong foundation for the Lyons Lift service by implementing a new scheduling system to allow users to book in advance. Once that groundwork is laid, they will work on additional features, “such as more hours — students really want weekend hours,” they said.
Tatian would love to receive community feedback and has created a form to gather as much data as possible from Mount Holyoke riders.
“I want [the community] to know that when they communicate with me, I’m here to listen, and I want to be able to take what they say and see what I can do,” they said.
To use Lyons Lift, students must be approved by Disability Services or Health Services. Faculty and staff must be approved for the service by the Department of Human Resources.
