At 6 a.m., more than an hour before dawn on a recent Friday, Jerry Logan started up the white mini-van outside his Naperville home and headed for his job with Ameritech Services Inc. in Hoffman Estates.
But the simple route belied the fact that Logan and his mini-van are out to boldly go where few commuters have gone before.
The Voyager Logan drives has been paid for by the Regional Transporation Authority. The RTA also foots the bill for gas. As long as Logan checks the oil and washes the vehicle weekly, the van is his for weekday commuting and limited personal use on weekends.
In exchange, Logan makes stops on his way to Ameritech to pick up fellow workers as part of his other ”job” as driver for one of the experimental van pools sponsored by Pace.
”We talk about sports, politics, family members, dogs, cats,” said Kris Shulman, one of six co-workers Logan drives. ”Once, before the holidays, we sang Christmas carols all the way home.”
While transit agencies in other cities have experimented with van pooling, none have gone as far as Pace, which is loaning vans to people to drive pools of 7 to 15 commuters.
While van pooling has been widespread in places like southern California, the New York suburbs of Connecticut and greater Washington, D.C., it never really caught on in the Chicago area. But suburban employment centers here recently have gotten so big, and suburban roads so congested, that van pooling is an increasingly attractive local alternative.
A 1989 survey by the Association for Commuter Transportation counted 10,500 van pools nationwide. The Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS)
estimates that fewer than 200 were in the Chicago area.
Pace hopes its van pool experiment changes the face of suburb-to-suburb commuting and holds promise for one day serving Chicago residents, who recently saw CTA fares hiked and service slashed.
If Pace`s van pool experiment succeeds, it would open up an entirely new market of transit riders and be one bright spot in a Chicago area transit picture marred by budget constraints and dwindling service.
Besides serving suburb-to-suburb commuters, van pools originating from Metra commuter rail and CTA rapid transit stations could carry the region`s growing number of reverse commuters-city-to-suburb commuters who, a recent RTA study said, are poorly served by mass transit.
Pace plans to buy enough vans to start 25 suburban pools this year. So far the agency has put together 13 pools involving 125 people, from the Lake Cook Corridor on the north through the northwest region to Du Page County on the south.
More van pools from Du Page County and the southern suburbs are expected after Sears, Roebuck and Co. moves 5,000 jobs in its Merchandise Group from downtown Chicago to Hoffman Estates this autumn.
”So far, so good,” Logan said as he started the Voyager to warm it up for its morning run. ”We had a few little snags at the beginning-no credit card for gasoline, for instance-but nothing that stopped us from rolling.”
Logan`s half-dozen passengers are Ameritech employees who take advantage of a flex-time policy to work an early shift starting at 7:30 a.m.-the better to beat the rush-hour traffic.
The pool began in December out of Logan`s house on Gateshead Drive near 95th Street. In exchange for captaining the pool and caring for the van-fueling it, taking it in for regular oil changes and washing it at least once a week, all at Pace`s expense-Logan gets to ride free and keep the vehicle on weekends for limited personal use.
To cover gasoline and maintenance, Pace bills the six passengers a monthly fare of $87 apiece. Each rider also contributes $4 a month for tolls. At 6:06 a.m. on the van pool clock, Logan`s first rider arrived-Ed Marsh, who lives about a mile away and drives to Logan`s house.
Until October, Logan said, he and Marsh worked at Ameritech`s downtown offices and rode Metra`s Burlington Northern trains to work. Then they and 150 co-workers were told their jobs would be moving to the new corporate offices in Hoffman Estates.
”Oh yes, we were upset,” Logan recalled. ”The big thing was going from nice public transportation to having to navigate through suburban traffic. That`s when we started investigating car pools and van pools.”
CATS compiled names of interested Ameritech employees and came up with a
”matchlist” of potential ridesharers, people living close to each other, among them Logan, Marsh and five others in south Naperville.
But despite efforts by CATS and Ameritech to promote alternate transportation among its 2,500 Hoffman Estates workers, only 32 have signed up for van pools, 130 for car pools and 25 for a Pace feeder bus from the Barrington Metra station, said Dana Kohler, transportation coordinator for Ameritech.
At 6:15 a.m., the van paused at Terrance Drive and Bailey Road in Naperville to pick up Shulman and Harry Albright. Both are back-up drivers who take the wheel on days Logan is off. One drives to Logan`s house, retrieves the van and starts the route in his place.
”One snowy day, some guy did a doughnut right in front of us, and Kris was driving at the time,” Marsh says. ”She hit the brakes and controlled this hummer like Parnelli Jones.”
At 6:20 a.m., Logan breezed past what would have been the second stop of the morning, at Hobson Road and Hobson Oaks Drive. Three people who would have boarded there were not working that day. Then it was north on College Road and Yackley Avenue and east on Ogden Avenue to the North-South Tollway.
Except for some congestion approaching Roosevelt Road, traffic on the toll road was moving smoothly. At 6:43 a.m., the vehicle reached the Army Trail Road toll plaza. Marsh, riding shotgun in the right front seat, fished 50 cents out of the glove compartment for the toll.
Pace said it has enlisted 125 people for its van pools, enough to start 13 routes this winter. But the ultimate challenge may be holding those pools together.
CATS` Rawling points out that Midcon Corp. moved from Chicago to Du Page County in 1984 and signed up enough employees to start more than 20 van pools, but today only a half-dozen of those pools survive.
”We`ve lost a couple (of van pools) when the driver`s circumstances changed and we couldn`t get anyone to take over the route,” Rawling said. ”A driver gets reassigned, and you have to re-shuffle the entire deck.”
At 6:54 a.m. on the northbound Illinois Highway 53, the Pace van passed Schaumburg and slowed for an exit ramp. Fifteen cents was dropped into another toll basket, and the Voyager headed west on the Northwest Tollway.
Aside from the companionship, Albright said he chose van pooling because, ”I didn`t want to spend the money it would take to drive, to buy a second car and spend money on insurance and gas.”
Shulman agreed: ”I figured that I`d spend $496 a month driving alone to work, and that doesn`t include tolls. There`s also the safety aspect of van pooling, of having other people riding with you.”
At 7:05 a.m., having exited at Roselle Road and turned west on Central Road to Ameritech, the van pulled into its assigned stall in the east parking garage of the corporate office complex.
The group had traveled 36 miles in 59 minutes.
”If more people did this,” Logan says, ”we wouldn`t have traffic problems around here, that`s for sure.”
