Pamela Krawczyk smiles a knowing smile when the topic of transportation for senior citizens comes up.

For the better part of her adult life, working for nonprofit agencies and in government, she has been consumed with the idea of trying to make it easier for Western New York’s increasingly aging population to get around.

“Transportation has haunted me,” she said Monday. “There’s never been adequate transportation.”

As director of senior services for the Town of Amherst, the region’s largest suburb and home to many of its largest residences for senior citizens, she remains knee-deep in the problem and hopeful that she is on the way to finding a solution.

Krawczyk, who studied gerontology at D’Youville College, served as Erie County’s senior services commissioner when Joel Giambra was county executive. She also worked 11 years for Salvation Army Senior Services and briefly as a consultant for the Community Health Foundation. At each stop, she has seen the need to improve mobility for senior citizens become more pressing.

She has worked for Amherst since September and said she is on a mission to improve what she calls the “gaps” in the town’s transportation system.

The Senior Services Department provides transportation for many of the housing complexes that dot the town, provided that the management of the complex pays the town a fee. (Amherst only partially subsidizes the service.) Residents of those developments can be secure in knowing that a ride to the doctor is going to be available to them.

But senior citizens who live in their own homes, or who live in complexes whose management does not pay the fee, cannot use the service.

“It’s hard trying to get them to understand that it’s not easy for seniors to get to the doctor, or for them to walk in the snow to the grocery store, so they don’t invest in transportation services, and [residents] go without,” Krawczyk said of the management companies.

Like most suburbs, Amherst was built and developed with the automobile in mind, which is fine for residents who have access to cars. But Amherst is also getting older—census figures between 1990 and 2000 showed that the number of people older than 65 increased by 4,000, and the 2010 census likely will show an even greater increase—which means the same residents who drove everywhere 30 years ago are confronting the idea that they no longer should get behind the wheel.

Joe Bernacki, who has worked as a driver for the town’s Senior Services Department for 11 years, has had that conversation with passengers many times.

“A lot of them will talk about how they had to give up their driving privileges and it was one of the hardest things they had to do,” he said. “Driving is so central to everything we do nowadays.”

What about public transportation? Pockets of Amherst are well-served by Metro Bus, but newer sections are not. And at least one study found that even if the bus stopped right in front of their homes, many Amherst senior citizens still feel uneasy about taking it.

Krawczyk has had only six months to look at all these factors, but that’s long enough to reach a conclusion about Amherst: “We have a good transportation system, but it’s not good enough.”

She wants to change that. And if she succeeds, she’ll have all the more reason to smile.