CHP Will Investigate Dial-a-Ride Use by Schoolchildren

The California Highway Patrol plans to investigate whether Orange County’s dial-a-ride program has illegally transported about 1,300 Orange County children a day during the school year in vans that do not meet state school bus safety standards, The Times has learned.

Ben B. Killingsworth, chief of the CHP’s San Diego division, said Thursday that the Orange County Transit District may have defied a 1983 directive to stop carrying students in dial-a-ride vehicles that lack certain safety features, such as rear escape doors.

“School is already out, so they may not be doing it during the summer,” Killingsworth said. “But we will collect evidence. . . . If we determine that they are doing it, then we may seek a conviction . . . if they continue to insist that what they’re doing is legal.”

However, OCTD officials, including General Manager James Reichert, said earlier this week that the CHP has known about the local dial-a-ride program’s transportation of schoolchildren and has never objected to it.

Reichert added that the issue involves conflicting interpretations of a vague law and said his agency’s safety record is impeccable.

Pending state legislation would permit dial-a-ride vans to carry pupils if they are overhauled to meet school bus standards, but Reichert said the Transit District would stop transporting pupils in the dial-a-ride program rather than comply with such a law.

He explained that it’s a Catch-22 situation: If the Transit District dial-a-ride, the largest such system in the state, spends millions of dollars retrofitting vans to be school buses, then OCTD could lose up to $22 million in federal urban transit money because the funds are restricted to non-school bus projects. In Orange County, the dial-a-ride program has a fleet of 140 vans under lease to private contractors who hire their own drivers. The vehicles serve about 4,200 riders per day, about 25% of them students. An average of 440 per day are Head Start pupils. Most of the students use dial-a-ride vans in the urbanized Anaheim area of central Orange County and in a few rural areas where home-to-school distances are great, OCTD officials said.

The service is available to anyone who calls and requests a ride within a specified local zone, usually covering two to five square miles. Drivers are routed via computer screening of customer requests. Fares range between 50 cents for seniors and handicapped to $1.50, with children 6 and under riding free.

Dial-a-ride vehicles are equipped with safety gear such as fire extinguishers and knock-out, removable windows, but they lack some of the equipment required for school buses, such as a rear escape door.

The Orange County controversy stemmed from an incident last year when a woman complained to the police chief in the tiny town of Waterford, on the Tuolumne River, that too many schoolchildren were sharing seats on Waterford’s only dial-a-ride van.

The police chief, who doubled as the city manager, eventually talked to CHP officials who said dial-a-ride vans should not be carrying children to and from school at all and ordered Waterford’s program to stop transporting students.

That prompted Assemblyman Gary A. Condit (D-Ceres) to introduce legislation that would enable dial-a-ride vehicles to legally transport pupils, but only if they are overhauled to meet state safety standards.

When OCTD officials were asked this week by a reporter to explain their opposition to the legislation, they spoke about the financial consequences for Orange County. Told about the CHP ruling in the Waterford case, OCTD officials said they believed they were operating within the law.

CHP officials said Friday that their dictum in the Waterford case may not have been duplicated in many other communities, because regional CHP district chiefs possibly have not received inquiries or complaints about dial-a-ride service.

In addition, some CHP safety officers said they would not know that they should apply school bus safety standards to any particular dial-a-ride program unless they were told the vans are carrying students to and from school--information that dial-a-ride operators rarely volunteer to inspectors.

State Figures Not Known

“I can’t remember it ever happening,” said Al Palmer, a Los Angeles-based CHP motor carrier safety inspector.

Indeed, officials don’t know precisely how many dial-a-ride programs throughout the state transport schoolchildren.

Los Angeles County, for example, has many dial-a-ride contractors providing neighborhood services, but almost all are restricted to senior citizens or the handicapped. One contractor provides service to students and other passengers in the foothill communities east of the San Fernando Valley, but city officials said they are not sure the vans involved carry 10 or more riders, a criterion for having to meet school bus safety standards.

The issues were a bit more clear-cut in San Diego, however, where CHP officials said they recently obtained an agreement from the North San Diego County Transit District to stop transporting about 350 to 400 students in dial-a-ride vehicles daily.

Another problem, CHP officials said, is that some dial-a-ride programs may be “skirting” the law by delivering children to a spot near a school but not to the campus itself.

“It’s a tough enforcement problem,” said one CHP official who asked not to be identified. “What are you going to do--hire lots of people to follow dial-a-ride vans around to see if they’re carrying students?”

Paradoxically, municipal bus lines operating fixed route service are exempt from school bus safety regulations and can routinely carry students as part of their normal passenger load. Like dial-a-ride vans, such buses are inspected regularly and must meet other, non-school bus safety standards.

Condit’s bill, which passed the Assembly 77 to 0 on June 4, is scheduled for a July 1 hearing in the Senate Transportation Committee. In its current form, the bill would only allow dial-a-ride vehicles to pick up pupils if no other public transportation is available.

Also, the bill would require dial-a-ride drivers to drop off children where they would not have to cross the street, turning the bus around if necessary.

Some Bus Routes Inconvenient

In Orange County, OCTD buses operating on fixed-route schedules can serve some of the students now using dial-a-ride, officials said, but some routes are inconvenient for others.

“Many parents of the children taking dial-a-rides work and are not able to transport their children to and from school,” Condit said.

“I think it is absurd for the State of California to require these kids to have to walk alone, often on desolate, unsafe streets, sometimes even without sidewalks . . . but without my bill, that’s the law and people will have to live with it.”

Meanwhile, Orange County transit officials and CHP officials continued to differ Thursday over the legality of transporting schoolchildren in dial-a-ride vehicles.

Reichert said CHP mechanics have routinely inspected and approved Orange County dial-a-ride vehicles for years and never judged them by school bus safety standards because “we don’t operate them as school buses.” “We think we have a safe operation,” Reichert said. We’re operating vehicles that carry a mixed load of schoolchildren and regular passengers.”

However, CHP officials and Condit said that mixed loads do not exempt dial-a-ride from strict state safety regulations governing vehicles that carry pupils from kindergarten through 12th grade.

More important, OCTD officials said they have notes from a 1984 meeting with CHP Lt. Gene Toll in which Toll supposedly sanctioned OCTD’s pupil-carrying practices.

But Toll had a different recollection of the meeting Friday and said: “I never gave them the green light. . . . It was not resolved, because there was more work to be done on that issue. . . . Their interpretation of the law was very different from ours.”

Toll and Killingsworth said they still considered the 1983 directive to be in full force and expect OCTD to comply with it. Killingsworth quoted the 2 1/2-page 1983 directive as stating, in part:

“The dial-a-ride system does not meet school bus criteria. Therefore, I trust that the transportation of pupils to and from school on dial-a-ride vehicles will be curtailed immediately.”

Directive Signed in 1983

Killingsworth said the directive was signed by Lt. G.M. Hart, who was acting CHP commander in Santa Ana in late 1983.

“We’ve had that (issue) come up in other places,” Killingsworth said. “Usually we reach an agreement to stop carrying schoolchildren with the system involved, with no other action being taken. But in this case (OCTD) there hasn’t been an agreement. . . . There was no follow-up (enforcement). It just fell through the cracks.”

Although OCTD officials drafted a letter this week to oppose Condit’s bill, officials said they decided not to mail it after The Times obtained a copy out of fear that the public would think OCTD is against transit safety.

Meanwhile, Condit said, “I wish I could accommodate the people of Orange County and will do so if I possibly can, but they would have to stop carrying students in dial-a-ride vans even without my bill. It’s strictly illegal, and I’m surprised anybody thinks otherwise.”