Dial-a-Ride’s Too Vital to Tinker With

The Orange County Transit District board’s effort to trim the sails of its dial-a-ride program to make it more efficient keeps running smack into a big problem.

That is, there’s an enormous need for the service for all kinds of people in all kinds of life situations. Every effort to cut back only serves to point up the importance of the service in the overall transportation scheme of the county. Sooner or later, the board is going to have to get the message that this service may be too important to tinker with very much.

The latest moment of controversy came when the board voted last week by a narrow 3-2 margin to limit the door-to-door service, for a one-year test period, to only the elderly, the handicapped and organized groups.

That suggestion, advanced as a cost-saving plan by board Chairman Roger R. Stanton, effectively disenfranchised a large chunk of ridership. Those cut out include mothers who want to take their children to the doctor, people whose cars are out of service or who have none at all, and regular public transportation users who may simply need to get to the bus stop in a sprawling county, where almost everything is too far away to get there on foot.

The board has kept putting the OCTD staff on the spot throughout this debate by asking it to find places close to the bone to cut. First they were ordered to come up with some cost-saving recommendations, and the best they could do was to suggest a curtailment of Saturday service. That raised so many hackles of people who had jobs and errands to get to on that day that the board was deluged with complaints.

The current proposal made by Stanton would retain the Saturday service but attempt to save money essentially through disenfranchisement. The staff now is charged with looking at the economics of the decision and reporting back to the board next month.

The answer will have to take into account that this vital service cannot exclude a broad section of the people in need, especially at a time when the entire trend in public transportation is to get people out of their cars.

Orange County is a sprawling, semi-urban area where it is unrealistic to expect that people can get places by walking to a bus line or making an easy connection.

The dial-a-ride controversy has touched a raw nerve, but it goes to the heart of what the service was intended to be, and what it takes to live and work these days in Orange County.