Valley residents share rides, save cash, make friends

By PETER H. MILLIKEN

milliken@vindy.com

AUSTINTOWN

Mahoning Valley residents who carpool from a heavily used park and ride lot here cite a host of financial, social and environmental reasons for sharing rides on long commutes to the same destination.

“It’s just a big cost savings. Also, it’s environmentally friendly. We have one car driving to Cleveland, instead of four,” said Emily Woodall of Austintown.

“How we do it is: The day you drive, you pay for the gas, the parking and the tolls,” said Donna Hardrick of Canfield, another member of the Cleveland-bound group, which rotates driving among its participants.

Woodall and Hardrick, along with Whitney Joy of Boardman and Christopher Nadaud of Austintown, carpool from the state-designated park and ride lot at the busy Interstate 80 and state Route 46 interchange to their workplace at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service center, which serves the Navy in downtown Cleveland.

The 72-space park and ride lot, owned and maintained by the Ohio Department of Transportation, is the only ODOT-designated lot for this purpose in Mahoning and Trumbull counties.

“We go in early to avoid the traffic,” Hardrick said, explaining that the carpool members work a 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. schedule under a flexible working hours arrangement.

The only potential disadvantage Woodall mentioned was the possibility of having to ask fellow carpoolers to stay later at work if one group member is in a job-related meeting that runs late and hoping fellow carpoolers don’t have scheduled personal commitments after work that day.

“It’s a stress reliever that, sometimes, I can be a passenger and relax,” Joy said.

Carpooling facilitates camaraderie among group members during the 140-mile Austintown-to-Cleveland round trip, Nadaud said. “We’re not just co-workers. We’re friends,” he explained.

When they’re passengers, group members sometimes work on their laptop computers during the trip, he added.

“Sometimes, there’ll be a conference call, and we call from the car and then join our conference call on the way home,” Hardrick said.

Shortly after the four DFAS workers returned from Cleveland to the Austintown lot on a recent Wednesday afternoon, three carpooling umpires left that lot to officiate at an evening high school age district baseball game 54 miles away at Canal Park in Akron.

“It’s a central location,” Anthony Swindler of Liberty said of the park and ride lot.

“Why should three people drive over there and waste gas when we can carpool together?,” Swindler asked.

“Who wants to drive by themselves all the time?,” he asked.

“It saves gas money. It saves energy. It’s just so convenient,” said his fellow umpire, Rich Randall of Boardman.

“I get a ride with my fellow umpires, and you get to go over all the different scenarios” in baseball, while conversing in the car, said umpire Miles Dotson of Howland.

Woodall and Randall said members of their carpools will sometimes patronize restaurants at or near the Austintown interchange, including the Salsitas Mexican restaurant immediately behind the lot.

“The park and ride is positive to have because it gives you some recognition from people that are traveling,” said Sebastian Rucci, owner of the California Palms hotel, whose palm trees adorn the eastern edge of the lot.

Rucci, whose establishment includes a restaurant, nightclubs, bars and patios, said the state does a good job of maintaining the park and ride lot.

The lot, built and paved in 2012, features porous pavement designed to reduce erosion, pollution and the need for storm drains, with stormwater drainage being facilitated by gravel beds around its perimeter.

Construction and paving of the lot was paid for in full by a $200,000 federal grant designed to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution, which was provided by the Youngstown-based Eastgate Regional Council of Governments.

“We’re getting cars off the roads, reduced emissions from vehicles, and it also kind of plays into a multi-modal transportation aspect, where we’re getting people to move to places by different means, rather than driving a single-occupancy vehicle,” Justin Mondok, an Eastgate transportation planner, said of carpooling and why Eastgate promotes it.

“We will be exploring the possibility of other park and ride lots” being established in the Mahoning Valley, said Ken Sympson, Eastgate’s transportation director.

Eastgate staff members use the Austintown park and ride lot to carpool to work-related events they attend in Akron, Cleveland and Columbus, he said.