OP of this thread says you should be allowed to be up to 15 minutes late. They clearly don't know what goes into Paratransit service. The average Paratransit trip is something like $80/trip in a lot of areas, no matter how far you go. Because there is a lot of curb to curb, door to door, hand to hand, sensitivity training and a lot that goes into the service. When people think retail customer service is a horrible experience for a job, try transportation.

And you're correct, there are only a few ways to improve on-time performance, the main focus, and that's:

• Get more drivers and vehicles, very costly - it already costs $80 dollars a trip. If paratransit riders take 4 trips a day, they are already costing something like $320/day. Shortage of resources is only a problem if they are rejecting trips and already meeting capacity. Anyways, they aren't forgotten, a lot goes into it. Maybe there's a driver shortage? No idea. Or maybe like the article says, it was snowy. They literally used shit weather to use as an anecdote that the service is bad. Sloppy journalism. Of course it's difficult to predict a schedule when it's booked in advance and a snow storm all of a sudden impacts it. Because most trips are standing order/subscription. A lot of Paratransit operations just cancel all reservations, which is probably what they should have done before stranding them, but then again, I don't know the exact context.

• Completely enforce the no-show policy, which means your vehicle will leave after five minutes with no exceptions. But OP says they should be able to be up to 15 minutes late after the vehicle arrives. Makes no sense. Or,

• The most realistic option. Use an algorithm that uses realistic traffic time and route the trips efficiently. A lot of operations have negotiated times or can be a lot more accurate about pickup times to reduce lateness from the driver or from the rider. Some systems use as the crow flows/haversine to schedule times. Additionally, they can get a lot of notifications about their schedule in real-time, so you're not late or miss your exact time. But you still need to be ready during the window because traffic and rider behavior is unpredictable when doing door to door.

That would improve on-time performance and wait times.