San Luis Obispo - Caltrans - State of California

SAN LUIS OBISPO REGION
COORDINATED HUMAN SERVICES-PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION PLAN
2. Pervasiveness of need for information by everyone --- consumers and agencies.
Every group with whom the consultant team spoke addressed the need for clear and
better information, sometimes recognizing that they did not know how to use information
that already existed. Sometimes this involved acknowledging that they didn’t know
where to go to get information. In multiple instances, there were new services in place
or planned for implementation that would specifically address concerns of the agency
representatives and their consumers but information about these was new or not readily
available
3. Need for seamless and understandable regional transit service options
Consumers, and their agency representatives, are typically navigating the region as a
whole, traveling between communities and needing to make inter-community trips work
for a wide range of trip purposes: employment, medical or services and social. There
are difficulties in using the multiple transit operators as a regional system where
operating hours and days differ; transfer locations and bus stops don’t meet; fares differ
and mechanisms for purchasing fares differ; and scheduling of routes doesn’t always
consider the travel timing needs of consumers traveling between jurisdictions.
Improvements along these lines among the public transit operators will do much to
enhance the accessibility and usability of existing services by the target populations.
4. Expanded inter-community and inter-county transit services
Many of the trips identified by outreach participants are inter-city and inter-county,
traveling some distances to services and programs. This is particularly so for services
which are centralized in the City of San Luis Obispo, serving consumers throughout the
County who must travel there to participate or to be assessed or trained. Most social
services destination clients in the City of San Luis Obispo have transit coverage by the
local SLO-Transit bus; yet for most trips originating outside of the City, a regional bus
can only offer access to the downtown transit center, where a transfer is required. All
efforts to improve the services between communities and the connections and timing of
those services will help to address the needs surfacing through this process.
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OCTOBER 2007