Lebanon
Getting around the Upper Valley without a car is about to become easier as several new ride services — including Uber — have started up recently, delivering relief for passengers in a region where people have long complained about limited ride options.
The new services are focused on short-hop transportation needs, ferrying visitors between the airport, bus and train terminals and area hotels, as well as Dartmouth College, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and schools such as Kimball Union Academy and Cardigan Mountain School. But they also are catering to residents in need of rides to medical appointments, shopping errands and work — or those out for a night on the town who want a safe way to get home.
“So many times I’ve heard, ‘You can’t get anywhere around here unless you have your own car and license,’ ” said Karen O’Connell, one of three partners who last week launched Lebanon-based car service D.A.S.H. — which stands for “dependable, affordable, safe, hometown” transportation, she said.
O’Connell, a retired lawyer from Florida who moved to Lebanon about 18 months ago, and Elizabeth Barron-Oakes, former operations manager at transportation service UVRide, have teamed up with Bill Solari, a former Lebanon city councilor and part-time deputy sheriff in Windsor County.
D.A.S.H. now has one vehicle, a navy blue Toyota RAV4 hybrid, which it’s renting from White River Toyota. The company charges $20 for the first 15 minutes of the ride, then $2 for every minute after.
Last week, Barron-Oakes was busy dropping off business cards in hotel lobbies, the airport, and the Amtrak train and Greyhound bus terminals in White River Junction. The partners expect to have a website online shortly, but until then they are relying on old-fashioned business cards, postcards and word-of-mouth to generate awareness.
In fact, Barron-Oakes scored her first customer serendipitously Sunday night at the Upper Valley Co-op in White River Junction. A woman who was walking out of the store noticed Barron-Oakes as she was pinning a postcard advertising the new car service on the bulletin board. The customer said she needed a ride from Quechee to Lebanon Municipal Airport the next morning.
“It was a chance encounter,” Baron-Oakes said. “But it’s just been apparent there is still a great need for affordable, short-distance transportation.”
Enter Uber
D.A.S.H. started the same week that Uber, the hire-a-ride-via-smartphone service, entered the market, and Uber drivers have already been ferrying people around the Upper Valley.
Dennis Adams Sr., of White River Junction, who has been a part-time Uber driver in Burlington, signed up to become an Uber driver in the Upper Valley through the company’s website a couple of weeks ago. A few days later he received his first “ping” — at 1 a.m. — from customers attending a wedding party who wanted a ride from The Shire hotel in Woodstock to the Woodstock Inn — a distance of 0.7 miles that takes about three minutes.
“I drive all the way to Woodstock and back and I figure it would be one trip,” Adams said. “I crawl into bed and my phone goes off again for a pickup at the same place.” He ended up doing four trips that night, earning about $100 after Uber took its 20 percent cut of the fare.
“It wasn’t the most profitable thing. At this point I’m doing it for grins,” said Adams, who also regularly drives for coach bus operator Premier Coach. “But the word hasn’t got out it’s in the area. Once the Dartmouth community finds out it will get busier. The biggest problem right now is consistency, finding drivers and maintaining demand.”
Adams started an Upper Valley Uber Drivers page on Facebook, where he writes advice and offers suggestions for drivers thinking about signing up. The page, which attracted 16 members during its first five days, includes posts from Adams with tips such as “it’s important to keep your car clean … vacuumed is important for five star ratings.”
Adams said only three people are driving for Uber in the Upper Valley at the moment. One of them, Peter Pardoe, of Plainfield, learned about the pitfalls that attend transporting people after they have had an overly good time. He ferried four young adults to a party in Quechee and made arrangements to pick them up later that evening.
When Pardoe arrived at midnight pick them up, the male passenger emerged from the house shirtless and holding a plastic bag. While another woman rode in front, the man squeezed into the back seat between two other women — and then promptly vomited into the plastic bag.
Pardoe said he heard one of the female passengers exclaim, “Oh God, it’s on my coat.”
Pardoe, who also works in the production department at the Valley News, took it in stride. “I do part-time stand-up comedy,” he said, “so it’s building material.”
Currier’s Courier
As word about Uber began to get around last week — thanks mostly to posts on the Upper Valley Facebook page — people responded positively to what they said was a sorely needed service. “(W)ish Uber had been in town a month or so ago,” Leah Periongo, of Sunapee, commented on Facebook.
Periongo broke her ankle in November “learning how to roller skate,” she said in an interview. Worse, it was her right ankle, which meant she couldn’t drive. The only nearby taxi service she could find was in Claremont, but she opted to “rely upon my husband when he was available.”
As it turned out, Periongo was back on her feet just as a new delivery service, Currier’s Courier and Ride Sharing Service, was launched in January by Newport resident Alec Currier. Currier, 35, said he was inspired to begin the local delivery service when he had an epiphany at the turn of the year that it would fulfill a need in Newport and surrounding towns.
Since January, Currier has been driving his blue and white 2000 Dodge Ram van around Newport delivering coffee and take-out meals to customers who contact him through his business’ Facebook page (motto: “Stay Seated and Call the Errand Boy”). He also provides the odd lift for friends coming out of bars at night or for area residents while their car is in the shop.
By 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Currier had already completed six calls, delivering mostly coffee to customers at work in Newport, Newbury and Claremont — including a group of four waitresses who tipped him $14 for bringing them four ice coffees valued at $12 before their lunch shifts began at Salt hill Pub in Newport.
“It started with me bringing people home from the bar,” said Currier, who is vocalist with the Upper Valley Aerosmith and Van Halen cover band Flew-Z and who lost a friend last year in a car crash in which the driver had been drinking. He quickly discovered that people also would be willing to pay someone to pick up errand items and deliver coffee during the day. He even set up a PayPal account — which enabled a customer in Florida to pay Currier to deliver a “birthday coffee” to the customer’s friend in Newport.
“I’ve never been more excited in my life,” Currier said during a break on Friday. “I think I’ve found my purpose in life.”
Moving People
The paucity of ride services led Plainfield resident Mark Horne, a former driver for People Movers in White River Junction, to go into business for himself after longtime People Movers and Big Yellow Taxi owner Kirby Ogle sold the companies and retired in 2014. Horne has contract with SAU 70 to drive special education students between home and school and now has a fleet of three vehicles: A Cadillac DeVille, a Lincoln Town Car and a Ford Five Hundred sedan.
The itinerant nature of the work means a driver does not know where he or she will be going from one moment to the next. “There are days when nothing goes on and days when the phone just rings and rings with weird stuff,” Horne said. Last week, for example, he was dispatched to DHMC to pick up a man who was being released from the hospital after a brief stay and needed a ride home — because he had arrived at DHMC by helicopter.
“He had been airlifted in from Montpelier a few days earlier with some blood disease,” Horne said the patient told him. “That stuff keeps it interesting.”
Horne said his driving service “probably puts a few dollars into my pocket each week depending on how much the phone rings,” but insurance costs him $5,000 annually per vehicle. The price of gas has been comparatively low in recent years, “but the killer is really the insurance.”
Insurance costs are steep, in part, because the city of Lebanon requires drivers to carry an extra $500,000 in liability coverage on top of the $1 million drivers are required to carry. Robert Revells, who took over Big Yellow Taxi from Ogle, said insurance for his fleet now runs him $17,000 a year.
Revells, who operates the taxi service out of his home in Enfield — the People Movers business was transferred to another acquirer — has four drivers plus himself and said he averages “400 to 500 pickups in a seven-day period.” But that’s not as good as it used to be, he said. “When I was working for Kirby we were running three to four cars on the weekend.”
He attributes the fall-off in ridership to the shrinking number of nightspots, entertainment venues and drinking spots in the Upper Valley. “It’s not the same since they closed all the nightclubs,” he said.
However, Solari, one of the principals behind D.A.S.H., said he won’t mind getting one of those late-night calls to ferry a passenger home after an evening of revelry. As a 14-year veteran in the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department, he said, “I’m used to getting called out at all hours of the night.”
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.
