Boulevard rather than a residential neighborhood.
“It’s not serving the residents,” Bender said.
Officials at Big Blue and SMC say they hear the residents loud and clear and are currently looking into ways to improve service on the agency’s newest route in order to meet the needs of both neighbors and students.
“We want to be good neighbors to everyone,” said Dan Dawson, spokesman for the Big Blue Bus. “We want to do the best (we can) to come to a compromise and make everyone happy and still allow us to offer the best transit service possible.”
Officials with the biggest public transit provider in Santa Monica held a community workshop on Tuesday night at the Fairview Branch Library to present a proposed route change and to hear some input from the neighbors.
The Sunset Ride runs from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays, connecting the various SMC satellite locations and parking lots with the main campus on Pico Boulevard.
The proposed route moves the current bus stop from the controversial intersection, which in itself has more than 250 boardings a day, further west down Pearl Street near where it meets 17th Street. The new route would not only move the stop away from the residences, but actually be closer to the campus itself, Dawson said.
But some residents still seemed discontent with the proposed route, saying that the bus should be rerouted to Pico Boulevard and stay out of the neighborhood.
One of those residents is Wendy Tatt, who lives in an apartment building on 20th Street and Pico Boulevard. Tatt said the bus has affected her quality of life, adding that she not only lives, but works from home.
“The bus is loud. It makes the houses vibrate,” she said at the meeting. “If I want to sleep in, forget it.”
Some residents also claimed that they had no prior knowledge of the Sunset Ride route before it was implemented and didn’t receive any notifications of a public hearing from the Big Blue Bus.
The Sunset Ride is part of the Big Blue Bus’ community transit initiative, aimed at bringing public transportation into the neighborhood in order to encourage residents to stay out of their cars and spend more time on the buses, decreasing congestion and air pollution since the Mini Blue Buses run on alternative fuel.
“It’s a community based shuttle and to be community based, you have to go into the community so people could ride it whether they go to the school or grocery store or doctor office,” Dawson said.
The line is designed not only to serve the residents in the neighborhood, but also the largest contingent in the area — the students and faculty at SMC, encouraging students to take the bus instead of driving into the city.
About 50 percent of the students and faculty at SMC actually live in the immediate neighborhood, according to Marvin Martinez, the vice president of planning and development at SMC. The remainder of the population actually live nearby in West Los Angeles neighborhoods of Mar Vista and Palms, he added.
Long criticized for bringing traffic into the neighborhood, SMC officials have tried to work with Big Blue Bus to find ways to encourage students to take other means of transportation, carpooling or riding the bus. One of the reasons why students haven’t utilized the bus very much is because they find it inconvenient with few direct lines coming straight to the college, Martinez said.
As a result, the college and the Big Blue Bus introduced both the SMC Commuter Line — which travels through Palms and Mar Vista — and the Sunset Ride in the past year.
Approximately 85 percent of the Sunset Ride passengers are Santa Monica College students.
“The college is open to try and make this more feasible, to make this new ride work effectively,” Martinez said.
Big Blue Bus officials plan to discuss the Sunset Ride issue at its transit plan-ning meeting next week and are expected to devise a plan of action. Any drastic changes, such as an alteration of the route, won’t most likely happen for a few months, since it takes time to notify the public about the changes in the schedule and route, Dawson said.
In the meantime, both officials at the Big Blue Bus and SMC said they are working to address some of the neighbors’ concerns of litter and cigarette smoke, sending out someone to clean up after the students several times a day.
Whatever changes are implemented by bus officials, Martinez stress that it will still have to also serve the needs of the students.
“It still has to be convenient for students to take because if it’s inconvenient for them, they’re not going to take the bus and we’ll be back to square one and students will drive to the college,” he said.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 8, 2007. Read the original PDF.