Dementia and Memory Care Transportation in Milwaukee

Transit Plus will take her there. It won’t check who meets her.

MCTS Transit Plus runs door to door anywhere in Milwaukee County for $4 each way. A personal care attendant rides free, a second companion is another $4, and you book 24 hours ahead. For plenty of families that is the right answer, and you should use it before you pay anyone.

Here is where it stops working for dementia. MCTS lists exactly two things it weighs for eligibility: whether the disability stops someone boarding, riding or getting off a bus, and whether a disability-related condition or an environmental barrier makes it impossible to get to a bus stop alone. It then says plainly that personal safety and behavioral problems are not considered in that decision.

Read that again as a caregiver. A parent in the middle stage of Alzheimer’s may walk fine, manage the steps fine, and still not be someone you can leave standing outside a clinic. Paratransit is a transportation program. It is not a supervision program, and drop-off is where the difference shows up.

What to tell us when you book

Most of what makes one of these rides go well is information nobody asks for. Give it to us anyway, on the phone or in the notes on the booking form.

• Who is meeting them, and where. A person’s name and a specific door beats “the main entrance.”
• Whether someone is traveling with them. The escort seat costs nothing to add and it changes the whole trip.
• The name they answer to. Plenty of people in their eighties respond to a surname and not at all to a first name.
• Whether they’ve refused to get in a vehicle before, and what was going on that day.
• The device — cane, walker, transport chair, power chair — and whether rolling up a ramp is going to be a problem.
• Time of day that actually works. See below; this one matters more than families expect.

All of it goes to the driver before pickup. The alternative is sending a van and hoping, and that is how a trip ends with somebody agitated on a sidewalk.

Book the return before mid-afternoon if you can

Late-day agitation is the thing people underestimate when they set a schedule. If the day program runs to 5:30 and your mother starts unraveling around four, a 5:30 pickup is the hardest ride of the week — every week. Ask the program whether an earlier collection is possible, then book the van for that time instead.

You can do that here because the vehicle isn’t shared with other riders. The pickup is a time you pick, not a two-hour window you wait inside. On a repeating booking we can ask the network for the same vehicle each week and often get it, though we won’t promise you a particular driver by name.

Getting to and from an adult day program

Adult day is the most common standing booking in this category. Two or three mornings a week, same door, same time. Two Milwaukee programs come up constantly:

• St. Ann Center for Intergenerational Care — a secured day setting for people with Alzheimer’s and other dementias, 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM Monday through Friday. Stein Campus is at 2801 E. Morgan Avenue on the south side; Bucyrus Campus is at 2450 W. North Avenue.
• Lutheran Home in Wauwatosa — adult day service 7:00 AM to 5:30 PM Monday through Friday. Closed New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it stays open on the snow days when a lot of other places close, which is exactly when a ride is hardest to find.

If the schedule is fixed, enter the whole run of dates in one booking rather than re-doing it every Sunday night.

What it costs, and the cheaper things to check first

A one-way accessible ride around Milwaukee generally lands between $100 and $150, so a round trip is roughly $200 to $250. Twice a week to a day program adds up quickly, and we would rather you knew that now than after the first card charge. Before you commit to paying privately for a standing schedule:

• Transit Plus, at $4 each way, if the eligibility criteria fit and the pickup window is workable.
• The Aging & Disability Resource Center of Milwaukee County, (414) 289-6874, at 1220 W. Vliet Street, Suite 300. This is the place to ask what a Family Care or IRIS enrollment covers for transportation, and they will give you a straight answer.
• Milwaukee County’s Department on Aging runs a caregiver support program and the Virtual Dementia Tour, which is worth an afternoon if other relatives don’t understand why this is hard.

Then use us for what those don’t cover: the evening pickup, the cross-county appointment, the trip where a curb drop-off isn’t safe. More detail in what a ride actually costs and every Milwaukee option compared.