Troubled Ride-Sharing Program Near Collapse

Southern California’s pioneering program to boost ride-sharing among commuters has produced only minimal gains and is on the verge of collapse after repeated warnings of mismanagement, sloppy accounting and conflict of interest.

During the last two decades, the government has pumped about $100 million into the nonprofit Commuter Transportation Services Inc. without adequate oversight to measure results or ensure that funds were spent properly, records show.

Prompted partly by problems with the firm, the Wilson Administration is recommending an end to funding all 17 regional ride-share programs, including Orange County’s, which provide the major catalyst for car-pooling in California.

“We aren’t getting the bang for the buck that we need,” said Transportation Department Director James van Loben Sels.

The company, which is the oldest and largest program of its kind in the country, was founded during the oil crisis in the 1970s by transportation officials at Caltrans and private corporations. Receiving about $10 million a year in federal funds, the company promotes ride-sharing through various advertising campaigns as well as a phone bank and computer system that match car-poolers in Orange County and four other Southland counties.

Company President Jim Sims said any problems the firm has experienced were caused by the failure of Caltrans officials to clearly communicate changes in government rules. He credited the company with doing a good job and said that ride-sharing rates in the Southland have remained steady while they have dropped elsewhere in the nation.

The company’s statistics show that car-pooling in the Southland has leveled off. The percentage of people who regularly car-pooled in 1994 is about the same as in 1990. The percentage of solo commuters actually rose slightly during three of the last four years in five Southland counties.

The state’s recent re-evaluation of the ride-sharing effort has been driven by the problems in Los Angeles, where government auditors have repeatedly criticized the company’s spending practices and other officials have questioned the group’s close relationship with transportation officials who have served on the company’s board of directors.

Hundreds of pages of documents and interviews show that:

* Year after year, Caltrans officials in Los Angeles gave Commuter Transportation Services an exclusive, no-bid contract to provide ride-sharing services even after their superiors in Sacramento directed them to seek competitive bids and after rival companies complained that they could do the work for less.

* Local Caltrans officials persuaded the company to use ride-share funds to pay for special projects that were not authorized in the Caltrans budget and sometimes had little connection to car-pooling.

* The Caltrans official in the Los Angeles district office who had responsibility for overseeing the company contract was also a member of the company’s board of directors, in what his Sacramento superiors called a conflict of interest, records show. He remained on the board even after he was urged to resign and was later demoted with a pay cut.

* The district director of Caltrans in Los Angeles was also disciplined for his supervision of the firm’s contract and was advised that his pay would be docked. But he resigned from his $85,900-a-year post at Caltrans to take a $125,400 job at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which also contracts with Commuter Transportation Services.

* MTA officials warned in 1993 that the firm was duplicating work already performed in-house by government transportation employees--and charging, in some cases, as much as 18 times more for it, records show. In one two-month period, MTA staff questioned or rejected more than $260,000 in invoices for trips, supplies, meals and services.

Sims, the president of the firm since 1989, said criticism is overblown and that he can document “every nickel, every dime” that has been spent. He said the allegations that his company spent 18 times as much as the government to do the same work are ridiculous.

Furthermore, he complained that the firm was unfairly faulted by auditors for doing things that Caltrans officials had previously sanctioned. For example, he said that with Caltrans’ approval, CTS regularly backdated checks for fiscal accounting purposes, only to be later criticized by government auditors.

For many years, the firm enjoyed a special relationship with transportation officials who sometimes were members of the company’s board of directors.

“We were seen almost as a subsidiary of Caltrans,” Sims said.

The company’s difficulties began, he said, when officials at Caltrans headquarters in Sacramento decided two or three years ago that Commuter Transportation Services should be required to strictly adhere to regulations and policies like any other private contractor.

He said this change of attitude was never adequately communicated either to the company or district Caltrans officials.

Although CTS is financed mostly by federal funds, the responsibility for oversight rests with Caltrans and the MTA, which administer the federal money. The company’s work is focused in Los Angeles, but San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura and Orange counties have also paid the firm smaller amounts to assist their ride-sharing efforts.

In Los Angeles, the firm has long been popular with major corporations, which are required to set up ride-share programs to satisfy clean air requirements.

With 100 employees in their Los Angeles office, the firm has teamed up with more than 6,000 Southland employers to provide workers with lists of potential car-pool partners.

*

Since 1989, the firm’s funding has jumped about 50%, allowing it to increase its outreach significantly and expand its commuter database to include more than 700,000 drivers.

CTS statistics show that about 900,000 people regularly car-pooled last year, or about about 14% of 6.6 million commuters in five Southland counties. This is the same percentage as in 1990. There were about 5.5 million “solo” drivers--or 80%, which is the same percentage as in 1990.

Also, the percentage of drivers who occasionally use an alternative to driving alone has dropped from 8% in 1992 to 5% in 1994.

the Greater Los Angeles area.”