Another political piece of the ongoing Eastern Gateway project, though minor

[Darkbeer1]

So in today's OC Register, there is an article in the business section in regards to the Anaheim Transit Network.

This is a quasi-government agency formed by the city of Anaheim back when DCA was being built.

As part of the conversion to the Resort District, Anaheim saw a way to get Federal Grant Money by reducing Air Pollution by forcing Hotels in the area to stop offering their own shuttles, basically gas powered vans, and switching to a shared shuttle service using "cleaner air vehicles". So the Anaheim Transit Network was formed, and started the ART system (Anaheim Resort Transit, now know as Anaheim Resort Transportation). ATN is a governing body and hires an operator to deal with the day to day operation, including hiring employees. It has gone through a few different companies, and looks like they are in the midst of a new bidding process due to the current contractor pulling out over a dispute over funding and operating costs.

So on December 1st, we hopefully will have in place a new company that will take over the current fleet of vehicles (owned or leased by ATN) and operate them. This includes the ART Route 20 Buses that service the Disney Toy Story Parking Lot.

So that does mean that the next contract between Disney in regards to paying for its share of the costs of operating the system will be one piece of the overall relationship between Disney and the city of Anaheim and the changing political situation.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/transit-732195-first-contract.html

That said, here is hoping that the new company hires most of the current drivers and staff.

 

[TP2000]

Great catch, Darkbeer! I read the Register daily but missed that over coffee this morning.

The ART system is really a story about the growth of the Resort District in the last 10 years.

The Resort District vastly underperformed in the early 2000's when DCA fell flat on its face and annual attendance barely budged, and ART reflected that. But during and immediately after the 50th when Resort attendance really started to skyrocket, the ART system morphed into a bigger and much more impressive transit system moving thousands per day. The wild success of the the 60th has cemented that, and ART has just debuted a new fleet of brand new hybrid buses.

Back in the early 2000's the system was a ragtag fleet of open-air jitneys moving small numbers of people.

Honk if you miss Cynthia Harriss!

But now it's a large network of full-size modern buses that are always packed and always busy.

Well, okay, the route that picks up no one from the empty ARTIC train station is the exception to the busy.

The Eastern Gateway transit complex seems to be doubling down on the ART concept of a Resort-wide shuttle system of buses, operating out of a central transit complex. I don't think the corporate owners in Ohio understand they just dropped the ball, as the Register article explains there are already multiple service providers bidding on the contract to provide the drivers. The Anaheim Resort District has shown tremendous growth in the last three years, with several thousand new hotel rooms opening within a mile of Disneyland and several thousand still on the drawing boards or currently under construction. Star Wars and Marvel are coming to Anaheim in a HUGE way for the 2020's, and the business of moving tourists around Anaheim will only get busier in the years ahead.

Apparently the clueless bosses back in Ohio don't understand that.

 

[Darkbeer1]

A couple of comments, TP2000...

Still having issues getting used to the new fonts and changeover to the "Southern California News Group" for the Register, as someone who goes up tp the Bay Area on a regular basis, I seen Digital First do the same thing recently with the Bay Area papers it owns. Such is life, though more articles are coming from outside sources...

But I think it is better than having the LA Times Newspaper taking control of most of Southern California, since they already bought the San Diego Union Tribune.

As for ART, it is run as a non-profit, and basically whoever gets a day to day operations contract doesn't make a lot of profit, yes. some, but it is the "agency" (aka ATN) that reaps most of the rewards. And ATN knows it, and when "Ohio" asked for an increase in fees, ATN knew they could find someone else to accept the lower fees.

 

[TP2000]

Regarding the Register... Family claim to fame was that a great uncle was the Register's publisher in the 1920's as it came into its own. He also owned the first Duesenberg in Orange County back then. So I'll always have a soft spot for the Register and will likely always subscribe. But like you I have noticed the change in both editorial content and aesthetics that the new owners have brought. Such is the "newspaper" business in the 21st century. It's a minor miracle the Register even still exists after fending off the LA Times ten years ago.

Glad to see that ATN had the sense to tell the Ohio corporation to go take a hike. The Ohioans likely have no idea what they had in the Anaheim Resort District or what the potential is there in the next five years. Surely a good business team could make a profit there, if they were willing to focus and work at it a bit. Amazing that it's such a quick and easy contract to discard and move on with. That swiftness maybe also caught the Ohioans off guard and before they knew it they'd been asked to leave.

That's the danger of trying to run a business from out of state, an office in Cincinatti running a SoCal transit system, when they don't have a pulse on the local environment and culture. Their loss.

Hopefully the replacement group will be California-based and used to doing business in California, now the sixth largest economy on the planet, just behind the United Kingdom in fifth place. http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/...an-all-but-five-nations-world-bank-data-says/