Pat and the Elephant faces 10-month wait for replacement van
CBC
Pat and the Elephant, P.E.I.'s accessible transport service, is trying to stay on top of its vehicle needs during a worldwide shortage.
It is not just the special wheelchair-accessible vans that are hard to come by — across North America people are having to wait for all kinds of vehicles.
But the shortage of the specialty vehicles required by Pat and the Elephant is particularly acute.
"We're getting it from all sources that if we order now, we might be lucky to get it next August," co-manager Halbert Pratt told Island Morning's Laura Chapin.
"There are tremendous shortages of vehicles like this on the road. So we are trying to sort of get ahead of the game."
Pratt said the service can wait, because it got lucky and was able to purchase a new vehicle off a lot in Quebec last year.
Following seeing a downturn in service requests in the early months of the pandemic, Pratt said Pat and the Elephant is getting busy again.
On an average weekday, the service's eight vehicles is transporting anywhere between 100 and 120 people a day. That's the highest number of vans the service has had on the road during the history of Pat and the Elephant.
"Weekends are busy. We run four trucks on Saturday and three on Sunday, and that's pretty well back to where we were again pre-pandemic," he said.
"We have a fair number of dialysis patients on Saturdays, so that keeps us quite busy. And on Sundays, the churches have started picking back up."
During the summer months Pat and the Elephant was short of drivers, and Pratt was concerned with some putting in as many as 60 hours a week the service could burn out the drivers they had.
But it recently recruited four new drivers who are training, and that is expected to ease the load.
He said, however, they are always looking and there is always space for more part-time drivers.
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