Wrestling With a Problem of the Ages: Youth Without Wheels

When Shana Rosengart threw a surprise 15th birthday party for classmate Matt Gainsley a few months ago, there was a complication: how to get 19 teen-agers from Matt’s home in Encino to Disneyland and back. It took dozens of phone calls to work out the arrangements.

When you’re a teen-ager without a driver’s license in the San Fernando Valley, it’s not easy to get around. Some solutions to the problem are new; others are as old as the nearby canyons.

For Shana’s party, most of the teen-agers were delivered by their parents or by Shana’s mother, Gerri, to Matt’s or another classmate’s home at 8 a.m. Then, a combination of private cars driven by some of the older teen-agers and two Shlep-a-Ride vans transported the group to the Anaheim amusement park.

“Many of the parents were not supportive of the idea of teen-agers driving,” Gerri Rosengart said. “Instead, they were willing to pay $20 each for a round trip.”

Shlep-a-Ride, based in Studio City, operates 13 vehicles and is available around the clock with 24 hours’ notice. The service is available to its 125 annual members, and anyone else who pays in advance. A one-way trip within a 10-mile radius costs $15, with a flat rate for groups.

“People call us and say, ‘We have 10 kids, and we want to go to the beach five days a week,’ ” said Shlep-a-Ride manager Augie Jimenez.

For the occasional trip to the mall or a friend’s house, however, it’s still Mom who does the major share of the transporting.

Many have mixed feelings about the chore. Pearl Kaplan of Van Nuys, worried about the poor safety record of teen-age drivers, usually drives her 16-year-old daughter, Melissa, everywhere.

“I am not in a big rush for her to get her learner’s permit,” Kaplan said. “I’d rather drive her around for a while.”

Other parents welcome liberation. Gail Glickman has an 18-year-old daughter who drives and a 15-year-old daughter, Andrea. She is looking forward to the day Andrea can drive herself.

“I live in the hills of Encino, and the thing about where I live is, it takes me 10 minutes to get down my hill to the boulevard,” she said. “So the moment my first daughter turned 16, it was a necessity to get her a car. Because I was going absolutely out of my mind. I couldn’t be in two or three places at once.”

When a parent is not available, teen-agers have to be resourceful. A bus is not usually their first choice.

Kaplan said teen-agers think the bus “is so degrading.” She continued, “I mean, they look at you like they want to die when you say, ‘Take a bus.’ ” Nevertheless, her daughter has at times taken the RTD to the beach and to the mall.

Stephanie Gross, 16, of Van Nuys said, “Four of us met at the Galleria in Sherman Oaks and took the RTD to the beach in Santa Monica.” The trip took about an hour and required a transfer in Westwood. “It was hard to bring stuff on the bus. I wanted to bring a chair, but I didn’t,” she said.

Some communities respond to teen-agers’ need to spend hot summer days at the beach. In the Summer Beach Bus Program of the Agoura Hills Parks and Recreation Department, for example, a bus makes five round trips Monday through Saturday, carrying youngsters, most of them between 11 and 16, from several locations in Agoura Hills to Malibu Beach. The cost is 75 cents one way.

The program has been operating since 1985. Said Audrey Brown, recreation superintendent: “It’s been one of our most successful teen programs. Parents love it because they don’t have to worry about taking their kids back and forth to the beach all the time, and they feel confident that it’s a well-run program.”

Feet and Wheels

What about those old standbys, walking and biking? Not uncommon is the attitude of Wendy Armstrong’s daughter Cari Stafford, 14 1/2. “Cari relies on me or on other parents to get around,” Armstrong said. “She has a bicycle. She refuses to ride it. Her feet won’t walk more than two blocks.”

But it’s not simply a matter of laziness.

“I think in some areas, Cari’s just afraid to be out on her own with the traffic and with the crazies,” Armstrong said.

Traffic can be a serious problem. When Matt Gainsley was 14, he was hit by a car while on his bike. Though he was not hurt, his bike was badly damaged and the driver did not stop. Since then, according to his mother, “he really has gone sour” on riding his bike.

Aaron Fox, 14, who lives in Simi Valley, rides his bike up to five miles. On his own, he can get to the orthodontist and to two local schools, where he runs and plays tennis. Aaron admits that there is a drawback.

“There’s a two-lane strip of road getting to the local school from my house, and sometimes the drivers tend to cut it a little close. They speed by, which is annoying,” he said. And there is the expense of maintaining the bike.

Walking is also not without problems. Adele Gainsley’s daughter Jessie, 13, is permitted to walk to the movies with a friend, less than a mile to Ventura Boulevard. However, Gainsley said, many parents do not allow their children to do that, even in daytime.

“I would definitely not let her go at night. I don’t even let Matthew walk around here at night,” she added. Gainsley said she worries about rowdy behavior by gangs of teen-agers on Ventura Boulevard and in the less well-lighted streets south of the boulevard near her Tarzana home.

“Kids now have a lot of fear,” said Bobbi Vogel, a family therapist in Encino who often works with teen-agers. “Most have never been on the bus, and the ones that have, including teen-age boys, are so fearful of what they would call the weirdos.”

Vogel said she believes that such fear has been instilled in youngsters from the time they were in nursery school. “Kids being brought up in middle-class areas are not real street smart, and they’re very fearful of dealing with elements that they’re not comfortable with, like strangers.”

Marilyn Gross, Stephanie’s mother, said she is the type of mother who drove her daughter everywhere, except for the very rare occasion the teen-ager took the bus.

“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people on the buses. You don’t want to have a girl standing at a bus stop,” Gross said.

Another alternative to parent-as-chauffeur is to pay someone else to do the driving, which some families do regularly. Gail Glickman, whose daughter Andrea attends the Sherman Oaks Center for Enriched Studies, pays a 12th-grader to drive Andrea to school and back home to Encino. A number of parents reported that the standard rate paid to a student driver is $1 each way per day.

Cabs are sometimes used as a backup. Marjorie Marks of North Hollywood relied on them to get her son, Zachary, 12, to his orthodontist in Brentwood.

“He would call another cab when he was ready to come home,” Marks said. “But I always worried.”

In the minority is Eric Ross, 16. He and his friends use skateboards to get around. “The farthest I ever skated was from my house in Tarzana to Venice Beach. Somebody worked out a route for us, through the canyons,” he said.

Safety aside, there are a few disadvantages: Some eating places will not allow skateboarders inside, and Ross once got a $13 ticket for skateboarding on the campus of UCLA.

Special Events

Special occasions call for special means of transportation. Teen-agers commonly hire chauffeured limousines at $225 for five hours to get to proms. Despite its expense, some parents prefer it to having their offspring driven by another teen-ager.

“When Stephanie goes to her prom, I may go for the limo, because I may not know the boy who’s driving,” Gross said.

Kaplan rented a double-stretch limo that seated 10 to take her twin daughters, Dawn and Danielle, to their prom. “They invited boys and shared the limo with two other girls and their dates, so I had to pay half,” Kaplan said.

Kaplan’s daughters also recently attended a prom at another school. This time their dates and seven other couples rented a recreational vehicle with a chauffeur. It cost $700 for the evening.

When Glickman’s 18-year-old daughter, Hillary, graduated from Birmingham High School in June, they wanted to do something special for her prom. “She’s not really a limo-type person. My husband thought it would be a lot of fun to go in an old classic car. So we rented her a red and white 1968 Ford convertible from National,” Glickman said.

The cost is highest the first time, since a $60 a-year membership fee is required. Such a car rents for $50 per day plus 30 cents a mile. “I think that in our affluent society, children are growing up where a limo is no big deal. She loved it, and everybody talked about her,” Glickman said.

On the other hand, her 15-year-old has rented a limo a couple of times with four or five other girls because they were going to a fancy party.

“It’s not cool to have your parents pick you up, and it’s not that expensive if everybody shares,” Glickman said.