The Easy Riders : Commuting Workers Escape Freeway Hassles on Newport Center Shuttle

It’s 7:16 a.m. Friday, and it seems odd that 11 of us are swooshing down the Costa Mesa Freeway’s car-pool lane while cars in adjacent lanes appear parked, as though the rows of motorists are waiting for a drive-in movie to start.

Mary Rankin of Anaheim Hills, an Irvine Co. secretary, occupies a window seat near the middle of our 18-passenger minibus. “I started doing this one day and I’ve been sold on it since,” she says. “. . . It’s no stress. You just sit down, you can sleep or read, whatever.”

On the back bench seat, Naren Mistry of Riverside, a Pacific Mutual programming consultant, flips through the pages of Success magazine.

We’re aboard the Newport Center Shuttle, the most recent in a series of experiments--some of them not very successful--aimed at alleviating traffic congestion in Orange County.

Two years ago, Orange County Transit District and Santa Ana city officials reluctantly decided that the “QT,” a shuttle experiment in the downtown Santa Ana business district, was an embarrassing failure after only a few months of operation, give-away promotions and $100,000 in operating losses.

Earlier this month, auditors hired by the Orange County Transportation Commission complained that the Laguna Beach transit line, which includes trolleys and trams that go to and from the Laguna Beach Arts Festival’s Pageant of the Masters, had experienced a 4% decline in ridership during the last two years and a cost increase of 14%.

Still, tram and shuttle services are expected to play a major role in moving people around Orange County in the next two decades. Environmental impact statements prepared for the planned expansion of John Wayne Airport emphasize trams and shuttles for easing expected traffic problems. So do environmental studies being done on major business and research complexes in Irvine, and the planned San Joaquin Hills, Eastern and Foothill freeway projects.

Recently, even the California Coastal Commission--which is responsible for safeguarding the shoreline from problems that include traffic jams--began insisting that plans for growth in Newport Beach include some sort of tram or trolley service.

So the Newport Center Shuttle, with a $120,000 subsidy from the Irvine Co., and an unrelated trolley service operating in the Balboa Peninsula-Corona del Mar-Park Newport triangle, are the latest attempts to show the way.

The shuttle’s 17.4-mile ride for a $1 fare to Newport Center (Fashion Island) Friday morning is bouncy and noisy, but nobody seems to mind. We arrive at 7:39 a.m., six minutes ahead of schedule and 24 minutes after boarding the white minibus at the state-county park-and-ride lot at Lincoln and Tustin avenues in the City of Orange.

An hour later, the same trip back in a car took 38 minutes.

“I’ve been using this since it started (June 1) and it’s wonderful,” says Donna Dann of Anaheim, a computer applications analyst who’s riding the shuttle to Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Newport Center. “I’ve got a 25-mile drive each way. . . . And if anybody as been in gridlock on the 55 Freeway, it’s awful. And you just sit here on the bus, relaxing. And then you’re at work, and you feel great. And you take the bus home, you feel great, you don’t have to hassle (with) all the traffic. It’s something that Orange County really has to think about doing more of.”

Dann previously lived in Santa Ana and rode OCTD buses to work. It took an hour and a half each way, every day. “That’s not rapid,” she says. “And that’s not transit.”

Taking the Newport Center Shuttle means that she works 30 minutes longer each day, since she used to quit at 4 p.m. but now stays to catch the 4:30 minibus back to Anaheim. “It’s worth the extra time that I spend at work,” she said.

Several passengers, including Mistry, said that the ride is quicker but that they spend more time because they arrive at the park-and-ride lot early and wait for the shuttle. But they said that the reduction in stress was well worth the extra time spent.

The two shuttle minibuses are similar to the stubby vehicles that hotel and car rental companies use at airports. The first shuttle starts its run from Peralta Canyon Park at 6:35 a.m., stops at the Orange park-and-ride lot at 6:43 a.m. and arrives at Newport Center at 7:15 a.m. The second shuttle leaves from Peralta Canyon Park at 7:05 a.m., picks up more passengers at the Orange park-and-ride lot at 7:13 a.m., and arrives at Newport Center at 7:45 a.m.

Transport People to Lunch

From 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., the same two vehicles circle Newport Center, taking people from offices to lunch spots, shopping and back.

The first shuttle returning to north Orange County leaves at 4:35 p.m., the second at 5:05 p.m.

Charity Crawford, transportation management supervisor for the Irvine Co., said that the commuter run is more successful than the multistop, mid-day operation around Newport Center Drive.

“One of the shuttles is always full in the morning, and the other usually carries just a few less people,” she said. “But the internal service around the (Newport Center) Drive has been very difficult to get off the ground. . . . I don’t think people know that it’s available, or they would rather walk to nearby restaurants and shops for lunch.”

In an effort to boost ridership around Newport Center, Crawford said, some local restaurants are participating in two-meals-for-one promotions, and OCTD is helping with “lucky rider” gift giveaways.

The shuttles carry about 32 people, making a slight dent in the number of motorists who use the Costa Mesa Freeway each day.

“That may seem like a small number,” Crawford said, “but it helps, and it’s a start. Maybe some of these people will eventually join van pools or car pools of their own, and that’s part of what we’re trying to get people to do.”

Meanwhile, the red and oak trolleys that run continuously from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. around the rest of Newport Beach are available to anyone who stands at a regular bus stop along the route. Or, said Newport Beach Asst. City Manager Ken Delino, “You can just wave ‘em down wherever it’s safe.”

Third Trolley Due Soon

Like the Newport Center Shuttle, the Newport Beach Trolley began operating June 1. So far, the two vehicles have carried about 10,000 riders at 50 cents per trip. A third trolley is due in service soon. The operation is subsidized up to $180,000 by the city, with another $50,000 from the Irvine Co., but it is run by Arizona-based American Trolley Lines, which eventually hopes to turn a profit by selling advertising space. Delino says that the trolley service is far more successful than the “fiasco” of several years ago, in which school buses were used to ferry people from city outskirts to the Balboa Peninsula. Those buses usually were empty.

“So far, the trolley is a hit, but this is the summer--there’s as many people around here as anybody could want--so we’ll have to wait and see what happens during the winter months,” Delino said.

Meanwhile, Crawford of the Irvine Co. is heavily involved in planning van pools, trams, shuttles and even incentives to encourage bicycle transportation for the Irvine Spectrum, a high-tech medical, scientific research and industrial complex under development at the confluence of the the Santa Ana and San Diego freeways in Irvine.

The complex is expected to create more than 50,000 jobs and, potentially, a traffic disaster.

But the firms involved in the project already are required to join an agency called Spectrumotion, which is developing mandatory traffic-reduction policies, including the use of trams and minibuses to curtail single-occupant car use during peak commuting hours.

Such policies are being written into the covenants that accompany each development or real estate transaction.

But Crawford concedes that changing people’s transportation habits will not be easy.

For example, Debi Larson of Fullerton, a Newport Center Shuttle passenger, said that a co-worker refuses to ride the shuttle because she wants the freedom to work late at the office.

Rankin, the Irvine Co. secretary who rides the shuttle, said: “It’s pretty desperate not to be able to jump in your car at lunch time and run here or run there. . . . Some people just have a lot of insecurity about having a vehicle during the day.”

But there are people who would use shuttles if more were available.

Mistry said that most of his co-workers don’t live along the route of his shuttle.

“It seems they all live down south around Costa Mesa, Irvine, Laguna Hills, around that area,” he said. “I actually know one person who’s looking for a shuttle. . . . He’s traveling to work from Oceanside.”