Driven North

It’s still dark at Las Posas Park and Ride as a steady stream of car-poolers angles onto the Ventura Freeway.

Unlike the majority of county commuters, who head south in the predawn hours for jobs in the San Fernando Valley and beyond, one sleek white van is high-tailing it 52 miles north to UC Santa Barbara.

About 500 of UCSB’s students and employees live in Ventura County, approximately 2% of the university’s total population of 23,000.

They are part of the more than 5,600 people who work in Santa Barbara and live in Ventura County, according to 1990 census data. All of them pass along the scenic freeway corridor between Ventura and Santa Barbara.

Most of these workers, faced with few commuting options, drive alone in their cars every day.

But the 42 Ventura residents who ride in three UCSB vanpools are saving money and reducing stress, while helping to ease increasing traffic problems and smog.

The university has eight vans, two leaving from Ventura, one from Camarillo and the rest from areas north of the campus. Sometimes as many as 20 Ventura County residents are on the waiting list, and the program is trying to get another 14-person van for them.

Driver Bob Stevenson, 42, leaves from the Camarillo Park and Ride every day at 6:30 a.m. On a recent morning, shortly after the start of the school year, Stevenson’s van carried 12 riders--some sleeping, some reading the paper, some chatting with other passengers.

Stevenson, who has been a driver for the vanpool for 13 years, works as an electronics technician for the university. He said his $190,000 Camarillo home would cost double that in Santa Barbara.

“I just can’t afford to live up there,” he said from behind the wheel. “And besides, all my friends live in Camarillo.”

He said he chooses the vanpool because it saves him wear and tear on his own vehicle, and when he volunteers to drive he doesn’t have to pay the $91 monthly fee.

Many of the vanpool riders are like Stevenson, living in this county because it’s cheaper and commuting along 30 miles of pristine coastline to a job in the north. But some of them have spouses who work in the San Fernando Valley or further south, and living here is a commuting compromise.

Tisa Jimenez, 30, is one of those riders. Her husband is a sheriff’s deputy in East Los Angeles, and she is getting her PhD in school psychology at UCSB. The couple decided to buy a condo in Camarillo because it was affordable and nearly equidistant from their jobs.

This day was her first in the vanpool, which she said was the cheapest form of transportation she could find.

“I have a used car and I don’t want it to break down on the way,” she said.

Amtrak was almost twice as expensive, and another Santa Barbara busing option left from the city of Ventura.

“I was looking for ways to get to school, and this is perfect because it picks me up right here in Camarillo,” she said.

On this day, the Ventura Freeway is not nearly as congested heading north as it typically is to the south. In 1999, an average of 56,700 cars crossed the Santa Barbara-Ventura County line daily, up from 55,400 in 1990.

Stevenson moves at a steady 65 mph through most of the trip. The van makes three stops on the UCSB campus.

He said the nasty traffic jams happen in the afternoon, but not at the winding, narrow stretches of freeway in Santa Barbara, as might be expected.

“It’s the Ventura County part that kills us,” he said. “Right at the merge with 126 all the way to Las Posas we slow down a lot.”

That bumper-to-bumper traffic causes the commute to take 15 to 30 minutes longer in the afternoon, he said.

In addition to the 42 people carried by the UCSB vanpool, 45 county residents are transported to several points in that city by the Santa Barbara Airbus, funded by the Air Pollution Control District, for $100 a month. Other private companies also run transit service for their employees.

At this time, no regular bus runs daily service between Santa Barbara and Ventura. But within the next year, there should be.

“The main demand and the main impact is at the peak times in the morning and afternoon,” said Eric Onnen, chief executive of Santa Barbara Airbus, which runs only at peak times. “A new service would address that by offering more trips throughout the day. That will help get people out of their cars.”

The seven-day service will be funded jointly by the two counties and will run from the Ventura County Government Center to Carpinteria, Santa Barbara and possibly Goleta. The routes are yet to be determined. The service could begin in about a year. James Wagner, manager of UCSB’s alternative transportation program, welcomes that day.

“There are a lot of people coming this way, and we only carve out a small niche of them,” Wagner said. “If a [regular] bus steals our business, that would be great” because fewer cars on the road would make all the difference.