ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : People Ride on Saturdays Too

If the board of the Orange County Transit District was wondering what its ridership thought of a proposal to discontinue door-to-door dial-a-ride service on Saturdays, it got its answer at a recent hearing. More than a dozen blind or wheelchair-bound supporters of the service turned out to protest the idea. Some of them, by the way, arrived by dial-a-ride.

The idea of cutting such service back on Saturdays may make some sense to bean counters, but it doesn’t make much sense for people who have to rely on it seven days a week.

The service serves about 1.4 million people a year in Orange County, about 3% of the total district ridership. Anyone can ride the vans by appointment, but the service is subsidized for the elderly and disabled. But on Saturday, there are about 1,000 riders now. That’s a lot.

The idea of cutting out that day was prompted by a desire to make the service more cost-effective. The board asked its staff to come up with some proposals and received a recommendation to drop Saturday service and add an hour to the weeknight operations. The Saturday program was, the reasoning went, the least efficient of the services.

But what the board heard from its riders is that the elderly and disabled who use the service are just like the rest of the transit district ridership: They have jobs to go to and errands to run on Saturdays.

What a bad idea. The board heard the message, and now will decide at its June 18 meeting what to do. It ought to keep Saturday service for the disabled and elderly, with the understanding that such service is essential.