“These guys are our lifeline,” said Puente Executive Director Kerry Lobel, her eyes following the last SamCoast bus pulling out of the driveway. Pescadero’s community center uses the bus service on an hourly basis to facilitate group travel.
In the rural communities of the South Coast, transportation can be a challenge. Although SamTrans Route 17 continues to serve the coast, over the years other bus services like 96C had to be canceled because of low ridership and hard financial times. This left the South Coast with virtually no regular public transportation.
 Lori Knittel stands before a SamCoast bus, which provides transportation for a variety of Puente de la Costa Sur programs. Knittel is key to keeping the service going on the South Coast. |
The on-demand service has a ridership of 900 per month, or 225 people per week, according to SamTrans spokeswoman Christine Dunn. In May, the average weekday ridership for all of San Mateo County bus transportation was nearly 47,000.
SamCoast is “a unique animal in our system,” explained Dunn.
For $3.50 each way, the bus takes passengers as far as San Jose to visit the Mexican consulate and as close as Puente for community events. The service is perhaps best known for giving rides to medical appointments.
SamCoast also transports South Coast high school students to Redwood City to attend Advanced Placement classes. The bus brings single farm workers to Puente twice weekly for community dinners called La Sala, or “the living room.” It takes kids to day camp during the summer; it brings parents and young children to story time, women to English-langauge classes and children to homework club. SamCoast has even taken high school girls up to San Francisco to pick out prom dresses through a program called, “Princess Project.” In its early years, the bus had a scheduled Sunday route to go up to Half Moon Bay for riders to do laundry.
Monica Davis is a La Honda resident who started using SamCoast three years ago after falling off her horse on a trail ride. Over the years, she said, she’s used the service around 50 times but she still remembers her first trip on the SamCoast bus. A driver named Lori Knittel picked her up at her front door and drove her to a doctor’s appointment at Stanford Hospital and they immediately felt they had met before. Knittel is the mastermind of the South Coast bus service, according to Davis.
Davis goes to the gym twice per week, and when one of the drivers who is also a member takes her, he often goes in for a workout, too, instead of just waiting in the car. “It’s not a cut and dry ride — it’s always social,” she said, adding that her dog becomes excited when he hears a SamCoast bus approaching.
In May 2002, South Coast residents watched the grassroots evolution of SamTrans Route 17 in Half Moon Bay, and realized that something similar could be done in their neck of the woods.
The South Coast Route 15 didn’t do so well on a fixed schedule because it’s expensive to bring buses down to Pescadero every day, according to SamTrans contract administrator Paul Lee.
“People were looking for something that was demand driven but not a taxi service,” Lee said.
Sixth months later SamTrans proposed a La Honda-Pescadero Unified School District-sponsored bus system called SamCoast. Knittel was driving a school bus for the district at the time and was a natural fit as SamCoast’s first driver. In 2005 Pescadero Foundation took over as sponsor of the service.
SamCoast has no grant funding and is propelled solely by bus fare and general sales tax. Next year’s budget is set at $141,662 to cover administrative costs, three cutaway buses, one full-time and three part- time employees.
The “bare-bones funding” approach has proven to be quite successful, Lee said.
“It takes a lot of work on Lori’s part to watch the budget,” he said, adding that SamCoast’s one minor accident in its eight years translates to a sterling record considering the 50,000 miles the service puts on its three vehicles each year.
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