REGION : MTA Provides Funds for Shuttle Service

Oscar Campa doesn’t like bumming rides from friends and family, but he has found that it’s the most cost-efficient way to get to work.

“Riding a bus would take too long and taking a taxicab would cost too much,” said Campa, a Huntington Park resident who works as a home mortgage lending executive in Commerce. A taxi would cost about $20 each way.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority soon will offer a cheaper alternative for Campa and other Southeast-area commuters.

Seeing the need to link homes, jobs and transit stations within the region, the MTA recently awarded $600,000 to the Southeast Community Development Corp.--a nonprofit umbrella of eight Southeast cities--to fund a shuttle van service that would cost a dollar a ride. The eight cities are Bell, Bell Gardens, Commerce, Cudahy, Huntington Park, Maywood, South Gate and Vernon.

With five 15-passenger vans running, the shuttle service could serve over 300 commuters a day, helping to alleviate traffic congestion in the largely industrial region.

Although the eight-city consortium will not receive MTA money until January, the program is expected to start operating by mid-August with $85,000 in funds provided by the community corporation.

Seven of the eight Southeast cities each put in $10,000--taken from Air Quality Management District grants--for the program. Southern California Gas Company gave an additional $15,000.

In Cudahy, however, officials said that not enough of their city’s residents would use the program to justify its funding. Instead, Cudahy plans to use the AQMD money to subsidize bus passes for its residents to use on local routes, said City Manager Jack Joseph.

Local government officials, who pulled together to form the Southeast Community Development Corp. to compete for grants like the one it just won from the MTA, see this project as a pilot program for a large-scale dial-a-ride system.

“Right now, many of our cities have their own dial-a-ride service, but they are confined within their own cities,” said Raul Perez, a Huntington Park councilman and Southeast cities representative on the MTA board.

Vans will be equipped with telephones and fax machines to speed up the response time for passengers, said Bryce Little, the MTA’s Southeast area’s project manager. Bryce added that the service will be like a taxi except it will run along regular routes, with vans veering off where necessary to pick up passengers.

The shuttle will feed to the Metro Blue and Green lines as well as stop at the Metrolink station in Commerce.

The vans, fueled with compressed natural gas, will help put a dent in the area’s pollution problem by eliminating single-occupant vehicles from the road, said Roman Gwin, executive director of the Southeast Community Development Corp.

According to the agency, a typical resident travels 7.5 miles to work. Roughly 57% of the region’s 300,000 commuters drive alone to and from work.

“We realize this is not going to take care of all the transportation problems in the area, but . . . this project hopefully is the start of something larger,” Gwin said.

A service operator will be selected through a competitive bid process within the next two weeks, said project director Sandra Stanko.