When Robert Holcomb agreed to participate in Week Without Driving he was pleasantly surprised when he discovered a bus stop near his home in Skyhawk in eastern Santa Rosa.
Holcomb, the vice president of academic affairs at Santa Rosa Junior College, said that by car it usually takes about 20 minutes to drop his daughter at Maria Carrillo High in the morning and then head to campus in central Santa Rosa. So the proximity to the bus stop was an initial boon to his weeklong experiment.
“I didn’t realize how close the Sonoma County bus line was to my house,” he said. “Getting down there in the morning, walking to the stop. Piece of cake.”
The trip home?
“On the way back it was a different story,” he said. “It was a different bus. And a different stop.”
The return trip left him a fair distance west on Highway 12 and dropped him at the bottom of a pretty steep hill. Even the route the bus took was different, with longer wait times and a layover at the transit mall.
“It was a lot more imposing,” he said.
That, ironically, is a bit of good news for Abigail Zoger, a member of North Bay Transit Riders and one of the organizers of the second local installment of Week Without Driving.
The idea behind the Sept. 29-Oct. 5 event was to invite leaders, community members and advocates to try to live in Sonoma County for one week without a car. It was not to prove the system is easy and seamless, but to gently point out that it is not. That way, organizers say, those same leaders can became more vocal advocates for advancing a system that better serves the community.
“Our goal is educational, it’s not to shame people. It’s not a purity test, it’s not for perfection,” Zoger said.
“Try to go a day without driving or to replace some trips without driving and if you can’t do that, I think they need to ask themselves, what needs to change in our infrastructure, bike infrastructure, pedestrian infrastructure, so they would have done that,” she said. “Because there are plenty of community members who don’t have the option.”
Participants this year included SRJC President Angélica Garcia, Sonoma County supervisors Chris Coursey, Lynda Hopkins and James Gore, and Assembly member Damon Connolly of San Rafael.
While college students, as well as students ages 5 to 18, ride free on both Santa Rosa City Bus and Sonoma County Transit, routes don’t always accommodate student life or schedules.
Dorothy Battenfeld, a member of the SRJC board of trustees, said she heard from students at a kickoff event that night classes — the kind that are attractive for working students — can be inaccessible for students who rely on public transportation.
“I heard from students, ‘We have to pick our courses around the bus schedule,’” she said.
The last Santa Rosa City Bus weekday pickup on Mendocino Avenue is 8:18 p.m., according to the city schedule. County buses serving the SRJC pickup end even earlier.
And in her own daily travels, Battenfeld, too, felt the occasional pinch when she tried to ditch her car.
A regular bike commuter to campus, she tried to mix it up and add bus trips, but the map function on her phone suggested it would be faster to walk or ride a bike from her neighborhood near Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital. Bus service wasn’t efficient for the locations she plugged in, the app indicated.
And on a day that she happened to have three medical appointments? Trying the bus was not an option.
“It’s going to take me an hour to get there and I’m not sure if I’m going to get there on time and it took me two months to get this appointment,” she said. “I think those are real challenges.”
Sebastopol City Council member Phillip Carter said his attempt to manage school and sports practice drop off with his two kids via a bus was a bust. But he shouldered much of the blame. The barrier to entry is real.
“My attempt to take my kids to school? The one attempt failed because of me,” he said, pointing to the significant impact that a shift to public transit can have on daily schedules, wake up times and the rest. The family pivoted to a carpool.
Carter, who 16 years ago launched The Climb — a single, 14-passenger bus fueled by used vegetable oil in Boulder, Colorado — knows a thing or two about mass-, or in the case of The Climb, mini-transit systems. He knows it takes flexibility in scheduling and it takes time to get used to things like managing departure and arrival times, juggling multiple errands, and the gaps between where a bus may drop you and your destination.
“I have been aware for a very long time, of what I like to call the ‘Tarzan maneuver,’ moving from house to bus to train,” he said. “It’s like swinging from vine to vine to make it all work.”
“You have to plan for it, prepare for it and get good at it,” he said. “To change my daily schedule for just one week is hard because I don’t have practice. So taking my kids to school suddenly is too much of a jolt in the morning. I have to ease into it.”
The good news? Carter’s two kids got the bug — at least a little — and have been riding their bikes to soccer practice solo since the family experiment during Week Without Driving.
“They are cool with it,” he said. “It’s an extra 15 minutes of their life alone, without me. They appreciate that.”
When Abby Arnold moved to Santa Rosa from Southern California two and a half years ago, she used mass transit as a way to explore Sonoma and Marin counties. But she had ulterior motives, too.
So she used Week Without a Driving to experiment with travel that is out of her normal routine — taking the bus to Monte Rio one day and to Sonoma another.
“I’m getting older and I don’t like to drive at night, especially on the freeway,” she said. “So I want to be good at tracking transit so at the time I can’t drive anymore I’m not housebound.”
For Zoger, getting more people to experiment with the mass transit system is a win, even if it takes some prep, maybe a bit more time and a dose of patience.
You can reach Staff Columnist Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Instagram @kerry.benefield.