Transit Proposal Would Give Insurance to Stranded Riders

Hoping to wean Ventura County commuters from the polluting, road-clogging habit of driving alone, transit officials have come up with a better idea: a guaranteed ride home.

Countless car-poolers and ride-sharers are stranded every day when their rides home are scotched by mechanical trouble, overtime and family emergencies.

“Many people rely on their cars to commute for fear of being stranded at work during an emergency,” says a report from the Ventura County Transportation Commission.

The commission today will weigh a Guaranteed Ride Home program that would rent cars and buy taxi rides for stranded commuters.

With $80,000 in state and federal aid, the commission hopes by September to start luring commuters back into public transit or shared rides by offering them the security of a ride home if something goes wrong.

“The hope is twofold,” said Tricia Price, regional manager for Southern California Rideshare.

“One is to re-secure some commitment on the part of employers to the value of congestion reduction through transportation alternatives,” Price said. “And two, hopefully, is to benefit air quality.”

If existing ride-home programs in several U.S. cities and private organizations are any example, the plan should be popular.

More than 36 Warner Center businesses pay to enroll their 36,000 employees in a Guaranteed Ride Home program that served as a model for Ventura County’s program.

“It’s been in place since ‘89, and we have found some cases of abuse, but not anything that’s going to make us stop the program,” said Elena Hidalgo transportation coordinator for the Warner Center Transportation Management Office.

Participants agree to fill out a survey after the ride and explain the reason they used it, how long it took and how the commute went, she said.

“Most of them are very satisfied with it,” she said. “And their comment is, ‘If it wasn’t for this, I couldn’t ride-share.’ ”

Dawn Daw, a secretary at Rocketdyne’s Canoga Park plant, calls it “a great program.”

“Two weeks ago today, I had come into work in my vanpool and had gotten very sick all of a sudden. So they called the Guaranteed Ride Home for me, and within 10 minutes, there was a taxi here to take me to Palmdale . . . and it didn’t cost me a thing.”

When a planning error pushed Montclair resident Della Nunezinto a vanpool--on the day she mistakenly thought her car was available for the 62-mile drive home to San Bernardino County for a doctor’s appointment--she also got a Guaranteed Ride Home.

“I called our local transportation coordinator, and she verified that I was an employee,” said Nunez, a senior premium specialist at Blue Cross. “She rented me a car . . . and I probably had to wait only 15 minutes more than I was hoping to.”

While Ventura County employers such as the Bank of America and Amgen pay for their own ride-home programs, the county hopes to weave them together and find public funding beyond the three-year trial period for employers in Ventura County, Price said.

The need is greatest among the poorest workers, she said.

“The highest percentage of people on welfare live on the Oxnard plain, and the greatest number of entry-level jobs are in East County, such as the Thousand Oaks area,” she said.

Ventura County’s ride-home program will work closely with county welfare authorities to ensure that those on government assistance who have jobs also have a ride home if they need it, she said.

The idea for the program was born of frustration over the number of ride-sharers forced back into their cars when car-pooling incentives expired in February.

A state/federal measure paid incentives through employers to workers who helped cut smog and traffic by forming carpools, boarding the bus or hopping the train for their morning commute.

Transit officials have no predictions on how many people the Guaranteed Ride Home program will coax out of cars and back into mass transit, Price said.

But they are “extremely enthusiastic” that its core premise is valid, she said.

“The most largely cited reason that people say they cannot share a ride is fear of being stranded,” Price said.