Lifeline Transportation Program

MTC's Regional Activities

Since the passage of the federal welfare reform legislation, MTC has embarked upon a number of initiatives related to the implementation of welfare reform in the Bay Area, focusing on the role of transportation in helping persons move from welfare-to-work. MTC's role has been to assist transportation providers, social service agency staff, Workforce Investment Boards, childcare advocates, community-based organizations and other stakeholders in identifying transportation-related barriers for the CalWORKs population as well as developing workable solutions to removing these barriers. Below is a status report of the various MTC-initiated welfare-to-work projects as well as a brief description of other MTC projects that may provide benefits to the CalWORKs population in the region.

Regional Transportation Working Group

MTC has created a staff-level working group consisting of transportation providers (transit agencies, rideshare agencies, paratransit providers) and social service agencies from each of the nine counties along with other key stakeholders as described above. This working group meets monthly to review the status of welfare-to-work transportation planning at the county level, to share ideas for local implementation and to identify planning and implementation activities that may be best approached from a multi-county or regional perspective. MTC has disseminated information on state and federal welfare-to-work funding opportunities related to transportation (e.g., DOL and TEA-21 Job Access and Reverse Commute grant programs) to members of the working group for use in their local planning and implementation.

Regional Welfare-to-Work Transportation Plan

In April 2000, MTC launched a regional welfare-to-work transportation plan. The regional plan will identify augmentations or service changes to the transportation system to better respond to the needs of CalWORKs clients, especially for those traveling across county boundaries or transit districts, and recommend regional policy and legislative strategies for MTC and its partners to pursue to further regional welfare-to-work transportation goals. The regional planning effort is scheduled to be completed by December, 2000.

Low-Income Flexible Transportation (LIFT) Program

In April 2000, MTC programmed $5 million in federal transportation funds over the next three years (FY 2000-2002) to fund welfare-to-work transportation projects. By programming these funds, MTC demonstrates its support of the local welfare-to-work planning efforts that have taken place over the past two years (see below). The LIFT program will provide up to $750,000 per project in operating and capital funds for new and expanded transportation services for low income residents. In order to stretch available funding and encourage partnerships between transportation providers and social services agencies, this program will require a 50% local match. The local match can include other local transportation funds, including fares, Temporary Assistance to Need Families (TANF), US Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and US Department of Labor (DOL) funds. Federal transportation funds, however, cannot be used as a match.

County CalWORKs Transportation Plans

MTC has dedicated planning funds to facilitate the development of county transportation plans for CalWORKs programs. The planning process is designed to bring together the key participants involved in implementing welfare reform in each of the counties (e.g., social service agency staff, CalWORKs participants, childcare providers, and job training and education providers) with their counterparts in transportation to identify potential transportation-related barriers to obtaining and retaining a job and develop workable options to eliminate these barriers. Plans have been completed for Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, San Francisco and Santa Clara counties and are currently underway in San Mateo and Sonoma counties.

GIS Maps for CalWORKs Planning

To aid in the planning efforts, MTC has created a series of Geographic Information System-based maps showing the home locations of welfare recipients, potential job sites, licensed child care facilities, subsidized housing sites, job training locations, major medical facilities and transit routes and bus stops in each of the counties in which plans have been developed. The purpose of this effort is to understand how well the existing transit services serve the needs of CalWORKs participants in each county. The maps have proven to be useful in illustrating the accessibility of these locations to transit and the gaps in existing transit services. Similar mapping projects in other Bay Area counties are likely to follow in conjunction with planning efforts.

Regional Transit Trip Planning System

The Regional Transit Trip Planning System, called TranStar, will provide a computer-generated itinerary for persons wanting to know how to reach any destination served by public transit in the Bay Area based on their origin, destination, the time the trip needs to be taken and the fare. There is a great deal of interest in this system by social services programs as a user-friendly tool to help CalWORKs participants plan public transit trips to jobs and social services, and to help determine whether alternative transportation will need to be considered. MTC is now working with the region's transit agencies to design and implement this system, which is scheduled to be in place for all transit agencies by Fall 2000.

TransLink®
TransLink® is a universal fare debit card usable on all of the Bay Area's public transit systems. TransLink® will improve access to transit services by persons using more than one agency's services to complete a trip and will simplify fare payment for both the passenger and the sponsoring social services agency. TransLink® will have the capability to track the number of transit trips taken by social services clients and provide separate accounting for these trips for agency billing purposes. This feature will provide significant new flexibility for program clients whose transit subsidy needs will fluctuate throughout the job search and post-employment periods. The demonstration phase of the project, which will start in March 2001, will involve six operators of different types of transit services. If the new technology succeeds in the demonstration, regionwide implementation could follow late that year.

Transportation Affordability

MTC’s Regional Welfare to Work Transportation Plan and the Lifeline Transportation Network Report identified the cost of transportation as a barrier preventing low-income persons from reaching essential destinations.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a private operating foundation providing research support for a variety of primarily statewide public policy issues, had expressed an interest in collaborating with MTC on the subject of transportation affordability.

In Early 2002, MTC and PPIC staff held a research advisory committee meeting with key transportation and social service researchers from UC Berkeley and UCLA to discuss how best to proceed with the research, and to identify the core issues relevant to the project. The research advisory committee suggested addressing some very focused questions over the summer, that would, in turn, contribute to our general understanding of the issue of transportation affordability, and would enable us to put together a more informed work plan in the fall.

MTC and PPIC jointly hired a summer intern in 2003, who produced a reference report summarizing existing research that has been conducted on the subject, titled Transportation Affordability for Low-Income Populations, A Review of the Research Literature, Ongoing Research Projects, and San Francisco Bay Area Transportation Assistance Programs. This working paper represents an initial step in the development of a research agenda on transportation affordability for low-income populations in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is designed to be a reference document for transportation planners and researchers interested in transportation affordability and related issues for low-income people.

In June 2003, MTC entered into a contract with PPIC to conduct research on the topic of transportation affordability, based on the literature search and the feedback from the research advisory committee. The final report – entitled Transportation Spending by Low-Income California Households: Lessons for the San Francisco Bay Area – was published on July 27, 2004.

For more information, contact Connie Soper: 510/817.5746 , or by e-mail at csoper@mtc.ca.gov.