Cities Try the Personal Touch With Dial-A-Ride Bus Options

In Thousand Oaks, residents can request that a bus veer off its standard route to take them to a favorite park.

In one Oxnard neighborhood, residents can telephone for a public bus to pick them up at their front door.

In Ventura, residents may one day be able to hail a subsidized taxi to take them to places buses don’t go.

Those three experimental services are examples of how city governments are working to personalize public transportation. Convinced that fixed-route systems have only limited value in a sprawling suburban county, they are determined to win more riders by offering them more choices.

Their model is the decades-old Dial-A-Ride network that provides on-call bus service to housebound seniors. Planners are trying to give that mobility to the general population, with services that plug holes in regular bus service.

“A fixed-route system goes to certain places, regardless of how many people are picked up,” said Roy Myers, Thousand Oaks transportation analyst. “We were having a passenger at a certain stop maybe once a week. This way we can still go there, so we are not leaving them without transportation, but only when they need us.”

It is too early to know for sure whether the services are worth expanding, but planners say the idea has the potential to remake public transportation in Ventura County. Instead of running an oversized bus that is virtually empty for long stretches, the idea is to start with a smaller vehicle and carry people exactly where they need to go.

In Santa Paula and Fillmore, Dial-A-Ride has been in operation for six years, and the majority of riders use the service to get to a fixed-route bus. City planners consider Dial-A-Ride a supplement to traditional buses, not a replacement. And Dial-A-Ride does not have the capacity to take riders very far--none of the services leaves the city in which they start.

But they do fill a niche that planners have been struggling with for decades.

So far, general Dial-A-Ride services cost cities more than fixed-route systems--as much as $10 per ride, compared with as little as $2.50 for the fixed-route bus. But planners say the cost is an investment. The service reaches people who ordinarily wouldn’t ride public transportation, converting die-hard drivers who, until now, have refused to abandon their private vehicles.

In Thousand Oaks, the 3-month-old Smart Shuttle has four designated stops--The Oaks mall, Janss Mall, Future Village and the senior center. Within a two-hour period, the bus can veer off course several times in an area roughly the shape of a square, bounded by West Olsen Road on the north, Erbes Road on the east, the Ventura Freeway on the south and Lynn Road on the west.

Because an average city bus might stop 10 times on a route, cutting the number of predetermined stops to four also reduces the amount of time the bus takes to travel its set course.

When the shuttle started in April, it carried about 2.8 riders per hour; now it carries 5.2 riders per hour. Besides seniors and students, it serves other residents, such as someone wanting to meet a friend for lunch or get to a day job.

Kelli Lewin, 20, is one of those people. With wet hair and bare feet, she padded out of her Thousand Oaks home at 6:30 a.m. when the Smart Shuttle driver gave a light toot of the horn. Lewin, who works as a veterinary assistant from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., takes the shuttle both ways. Recently, her father made a standing reservation--three days a week pickup and delivery from work to home.

“My dad said he wanted to give me more freedom, but I think he didn’t want to get up so early to drive me to work,” she said. “I’ve taken [the county bus] a couple times, and this is much easier and more convenient, because I don’t have to walk anywhere.”

She said the service is very much like an inexpensive taxi, “except the seats are really comfy and it doesn’t smell like smoke the way a taxi would.”

Lewin is the type of rider that planners are trying to reach, even at added cost.

“The bottom line is: Creative solutions like this provide a better product, and that makes the additional cost worth it,” said Tom Mericle, transportation engineer for Ventura. “As the service matures, it will recruit for itself and we will end up making up the cost difference.”

When Thousand Oaks started its shuttle service, it cost the city more than $10 per rider; now it’s down to $7. Myers said he hopes it will drop to $5, the same amount it costs to transport a rider on the local fixed-route bus.

In Fillmore and Santa Paula, Dial-A-Ride costs the cities and the county between $1.70 and $2.37 per rider, because its buses carry a large number of passengers per hour, said Maureen Hooper Lopez, former transit director for the Ventura County Transportation Commission. The high ridership is the result of years of operation.

“This county is not that transit-oriented when compared to big cities, and there are people who would never consider riding the bus who would use Dial-A-Ride,” said Kathy Connell, senior transportation analyst for the county. Many potential riders shy away from traditional buses because of perceived and actual problems, including buses that take too long and schedules that are continually changing, are unreliable and are confusing to read.

Oxnard’s upcoming Dial-A-Ride service will try to recruit that untapped bus rider population.

The minibus will travel the beach area, including Silver Strand and Hollywood Beach, as well as the area bordered by Hemlock Street, Ventura Road, Channel Islands Boulevard and Victoria Avenue.

To help riders change from one bus to another, the shuttle can leave the area for three specific destinations: Oxnard Airport, the transportation center and the C Street bus transfer station.

“We have tried and tried to create an audience for big, old lumbering 40-foot buses in this area, but no one wants to ride a bus that wanders from point to point,” said Rita Johnson, Oxnard’s transportation program manager. “This is our last shot; we have no other ideas of how to provide public transit for the beaches area.”

Like Johnson, many county transportation officials have reached a point of desperation, because existing buses are not being used for long stretches, while the number of cars on the road continues to climb.

The city of Ventura is looking to improve its No. 12 route, which runs from the San Buenaventura Mall to the Pierpont residential area and west on Thompson Boulevard and Main Street.

That route used to feature all-day service, but it was so underused that the city cut it back to peak hours only. City officials believe there’s a better way to serve more people.

One option is contracting a taxi company to provide on-demand transportation at a reduced cost for the city. Another is fixed-route service where the bus would guarantee to be at three specific stops at certain times. The rest of the time, the bus would pick up riders, like a Dial-A-Ride, or sit at the bus stop.

“If we took the service away completely, we would have a need for transit,” said Tom Mericle, a city transportation engineer. “But service like this, with one-hour headway, doesn’t provide something very user-friendly.”

Headway--the time it takes to go from the start to the end of a route--is important to planners and riders. If it takes an hour to ride five miles from the mall to your house, Mericle asked, who is going to take a public bus?

The solution, said Mericle and others, is a suburban transportation network that includes large buses during peak times for longer distances and Dial-A-Ride service for riders who aren’t going to a high-density location or need to travel at an off-peak time.

“I think there is a shift in philosophy,” Mericle said. “It used to be that cities provided [transportation] because they had to, but they would provide as little as possible. What is coming about now is a lot of grass-roots requests from the community, coupled with the leadership understanding what dependence on cars has done to the environment and to communities.”

The combination is creating the groundswell necessary for real change, he said.