Riders, Complaints Up on Bus Routes : Thousand Oaks: The city will hire a consultant to gauge opinions about the system. Patrons call for added service and more reliability.

It is 2 p.m. and Vera Giamarco is fuming. Riding the bus in Thousand Oaks always makes her tense and nervous, Giamarco says, because she never knows if it will arrive on time.

“I have been so upset with this service,” said the 48-year-old Giamarco. “I’ve missed doctors’ and other appointments. It gets to be a pain in the neck.”

Giamarco is one of many Thousand Oaks Transit System riders who complain of chronic slow and late service whenever they take the bus, according to city officials.

Others have written to city officials complaining of lack of weekend service, breakdowns that force entire routes to be canceled and waits of up to 70 minutes between rides. In fact, some of the only people who rave about bus service are seniors, some of whom said their less rigid schedules make taking the bus more of an option.

The city this month is expected to hire a consultant for $100,000 to find out what people think of the bus line. Part of the study involves conducting the city’s first survey of both bus riders and people who do not ride the system. The survey is expected to be completed in mid-1992 and will be followed by recommendations for improvement of service and new funding sources.

The complaints are familiar to Thousand Oaks officials, who respond that the local bus service’s bad reputation is undeserved. They say the city is trying hard to improve service and has boosted ridership in recent years.

Under the county’s new Rule 210, cities and large businesses must find ways to reduce air pollution by cutting down on the number of people who drive alone to work. City officials believe that one way is to lure working people away from their cars and onto a bus.

“The transit system right now is not set up for the commuter,” acknowledged Roy Myers, a Thousand Oaks engineer who coordinates the city’s transit system. “If it weren’t for the ecology and Rule 210, there probably wouldn’t be a demand.”

The city has never conducted a survey on transit services. But Myers said he has noticed that demands for improvement are growing.

Over the past year, the city has received at least 40 letters from residents and public officials, most calling for additional routes. Between January and December of last year, the city received 27 telephone complaints about service, compared with 26 this year so far.

County and city officials acknowledge that bus ridership in Thousand Oaks, a community of about 104,000 people, has lagged compared to other communities.

Among the four largest cities in the county, it has the smallest number of bus routes and the tiniest fleet of buses. There are only three routes in Thousand Oaks and four buses, one of which is used as a backup.

Until last year, when the city bought new buses, if one broke down, a whole route was deleted for the rest of the day, Myers said. He said there are fewer breakdowns today. Still, riders say they would rather drive than ride.

Cassie Johnson, 15, a sophomore at Westlake High School, said she can’t get anywhere on a bus on weekends and has missed appointments during the week because bus service is sporadic.

“Once I had to be home at a certain time, and I couldn’t get home,” she said. “If I had other transportation, I wouldn’t take it.”

Some people complained of waiting at a stop during the noon hour, only to realize that service had stopped completely between 12 and 2 p.m. Only a handful of stops have signs indicating when the bus stops and where it is going.

Last year, 103,170 riders took the bus in Thousand Oaks, even after the city offered a whole month of free rides to promote the service.

In comparison, more than three times as many riders--326,741--chose to board buses in neighboring Simi Valley, a community with virtually the same number of residents and only one more route than in Thousand Oaks. Ridership is expected to increase to 360,000 next year, a Simi Valley official said.

Another bus line, South Coast Area Transit, that serves Ventura, Oxnard, Port Hueneme, Santa Paula and Ojai, with a combined population of about 260,000 people, logged 2.8 million riders last year.

Last year, Thousand Oaks spent $312,500 to run buses and received only $45,570 in fares. It also spent $8,000 for radio and newspaper advertising to promote the buses. That expense, officials say, has paid off.

Thousand Oaks officials say bus ridership in the city actually increased at an annual rate of 20% during the past six years.

“It’s clean, and it’s always on time,” said Sue Harmon, 66, as she and her 69-year-old husband, John, rode a bus from her home in Westlake to the Janss Mall. Harmon said she is riding the buses more these days. “It’s excellent.”

One county official said an increase in the number of seniors is also fueling the demand for more buses to accommodate them.

“It’s definitely a bare-bones system. . . . Up until two years ago, there really wasn’t much demand from the community of Thousand Oaks that money be put into public transit,” said Mary Travis, manager of transit programs for the Ventura County Transportation Commission.

Businesses have been clamoring for new routes to serve more neighborhoods because of Rule 210, Travis said. Under the rule, businesses with at least 100 workers must have 1.35 people for each vehicle driven to work, or about four people for every three cars.

Stephen J. Rubenstein, executive director of the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce said many businesses will be hard-pressed to meet those goals because workers cannot depend on the current bus schedules.

The county Transportation Commission is considering reviving a connecting bus between Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Simi Valley to accommodate commuters who live in eastern Ventura County.

One bus rider who said she would welcome a bus to Simi Valley is Leonore Olson, who occasionally takes a bus from her home in Simi Valley to get to her part-time job in the Westlake area of Thousand Oaks by 8:30 a.m.

To do that, she takes a 5:50 a.m. bus from Simi Valley into the San Fernando Valley and catches a Los Angeles County-RTD bus that deposits her in Thousand Oaks. Two and a half hours and four buses after she began the journey, she is in Thousand Oaks.

By car, she explained, the trip only takes about half an hour.

“I don’t blame people for not riding. I’m not a happy rider,” Olson said. After several frustrating trips, she has decided to switch back to her car.

“If my car isn’t working, I’ll take the bus. But I wouldn’t ride the bus regularly,” she said. “They want to get cars off the road, but they’re not going to do that unless they get reliable transportation.”