Van pools ease a reverse commute
By Elmer Smith
Published February 23, 2007
SHE WAS OUT there before sunrise most mornings, waiting for the first bus to start her three-hour commute to that "good" job in the suburbs.
It is a good job, and Karen Robinson, a micrographics librarian at Quest Diagnostics' revenue center in Norristown, was more than willing to put in a 25-30-hour weekly commute to keep it.
"I'd catch the 65 or the 30, whichever came first," she recalled. "That got me to 69th Street, then the Route 100 to the Norristown Transportation Center would generally get there just in time for us to miss the 131 to the job.
"By the time I got home in the evenings, I was so tired I didn't want to do anything but sleep."
That's all just an unpleasant memory now. Robinson drives to work today in a van provided by Philadelphia Unemployment Project's Commuter Options Program. The program provides vans for people who are making reverse commutes - traveling from the city to the suburbs for work - and who are willing to drive other workers making the same commute.
There are 19 other drivers. They are among some 90 workers who have been able to find or hold onto jobs in the suburbs that may have been out of reach without the innovative reverse-commute program.
Karen Robinson and her van- poolers all work at Quest Diagnostics in jobs that pay from $13 to $17 per hour, the kind of jobs they may never have found in the city where they all live.
The commuter-options program purchases the vans, insures and maintains them. The drivers keep the vans for as long as they are in the program, and they can make limited use of them after work and on weekends.
For Robinson, the program offers convenience. For about half of the 90 workers using the 20 vans on the street so far, the program makes the difference between working and not.
"About 40 percent of the workers are just off of welfare," said John Dodds, executive director of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project (PUP). "We'd love to find jobs for them in the city. But our choice is to wait for that to happen or go to where the work is.
"We've been at this for a year. The concept came from Congressman Chaka Fattah, who said there was some funding available for reverse commutes if we could figure out how to do it.
"He got us $1.5 million in federal money, and we got matches from the state Labor and state Welfare departments. We spent about $650,000 the first year for 20 vans. We expect to have 37 vans on the street by the end of the year."
There is an elegance in the simplicty of this initiative. Unemployment is close to 6 percent in the city but only 3.9 percent in the region. It's at 3 percent in Montgomery County, where Robinson works.
Because the ratio of jobs to workers is so high, suburban employers pay a bit more for the same workers. PUP requires a minimum salary of $8 per hour for the companies it supplies van-pool workers to.
It also seeks a $2,000 annual subsidy from the employing companies. That effort has met with only mixed results. Quest is kicking in this year.
Between the few companies who are kicking in the $2,000 and the $5 to $6 a day the workers put in, the budget can support the program expansion planned for the second year. After that...
"We want to become self-sufficient," Dodds said. "The question is whether we will get another federal grant to keep going. The potential is great. We've just got to get the companies to buy in.
"We need to make it easier for people to get to these good-paying jobs. Nobody wants to be on welfare. People need to work and they want to work."
Karen Robinson is a single mother whose daughter is a business major at Drexel University. She gave up a four-day workweek to conform her schedule to the others' in her van pool.
"You make sacrifices to make it work," she said. "We all did. But it's worth it."