SOPA Offers Jitney Rides to Non-Profit Groups

Dorothy Taylor is a retired school administrator who likes helping kindergarten and first grade students build vocabulary and get comfortable reading. “It’s one-on-one work and I can see it energizes them,” she says.

Dorothy was one of 10 South Orange seniors involved in the most recent “Reading Buddies” program at South Mountain School Annex. Since most volunteers don’t have cars, they relied on jitneys from the South Orange Parking Authority to bring them to the kids.

Jitneys picked up the volunteers at a down town assisted living facility, took them to the annex for the one-hour session, and returned them afterwards.

The cost of the jitney rides?

Nothing.

Reading Buddies is one example of “how we give back and contribute to the community,” said Parking Authority Executive Director Mark Hartwyk. “We foot the bill for these kinds of expenses. Our buses aren’t just sitting idle all day.”

Last year, the Parking Authority (SOPA) made thousands of dollars in landscape improvement in the Sloan Street parking lot. They added two state-of-the-art pay stations in the Taylor Place parking lot, and introduced the Smart Park Card, a parking debit card that lets drivers pay without coins.

Hartwyk can recite a litany of recent parking lot improvements around town, but the real measure of SOPA’s success, he says, boils down to one question: “How did we contribute?”

Part of the answer comes from community groups that rely on free, or nearly free, jitney service.

Like the organizers of the South Orange/Maplewood Baseball/Softball Parade held last month in South Orange. One thousand players, their families, friends and pets gathered for what South Orange Recreation Director Kate Schmidt calls “the all-American event.”

The convergence of people would be a nightmare if everyone had to track down parking before the parade.

 “Jitney service is essential,” said Schmidt. Continuous loops to remote parking make “a much more pleasant experience for everybody.”

South Orange River Day on May 6 will create another use for jitney service. Last year’s cleanup barely touched the part of the Rahway River that extends from Third Street to the Maplewood border. That’s because volunteers had to walk one mile round trip from the main cleanup site to get there. This year, jitneys will transport volunteers to the remote site, and a longer stretch of the river will be beautified.

The charge for such services is nominal or nothing at all, even though in its regular operations, SOPA pays more than $130,000 a year in driver salaries and benefits.

Amy Jo Curran, assistant director of the HK Community Fund, said jitneys were vital to her six-week after-school program for middle schoolers, and “we offered to pay. But at the very end, he (Hartwyk), said, ‘No thank you, it’s our privilege to help.’”

 Curran noted, “We’re a very small grassroots nonprofit, so we were thrilled to able to use that money in other ways.”

Jitneys are used during South Orange’s annual historic house tours, with visitors riding from one house to the next.

The South Orange Maplewood Adult School runs an annual summer sports program for children who hop on jitneys at the middle school and head out to their respective camp sites. Later, jitneys take some of them to after-care at the YMCA.

“The Board of Ed used to do that,” said Adult School Director Sue Marcus. “But they no longer can, so it’s very important to have the jitneys. They make life easier for a lot of parents.”

Besides jitney transport, SOPA finds other ways to contribute in the community. The authority forfeits parking income when it loans its lots for community events such as Main Street’s “Celebrate South Orange” or the weekly farmers’ market.

SOPA also assisted the South Orange/Maplewood Bicycle Coalition when they began sponsoring Bike to Work Week.

Even local cops know that SOPA jitneys are a nonprofit blessing.

Every summer, 25 tweens sign up for the South Orange Police Department’s “Junior Police Academy.” Field trips are a big part of the program — trips to the county policy academy and prosecutor’s office, the New York City Police Museum, and the Newark Police Emergency Services Unit.

Three or four officers accompany the students on free jitneys. “I try to limit the goofing around,” says Det. Mark Garrett, who runs the academy, “but we do bond on the bus because it’s down time.”

In the police world, bonding with local kids is gold. And if not for those free jitneys, the Junior Police Academy probably wouldn’t exist. “The program fee wouldn’t cover the cost of renting a regular bus,” said Garrett.

To learn more about South Orange Parking Authority jitneys, call (973) 378-7715, x2037.