Traffic Ties : Consultants Want to Grab Part of the Potentially Big Market That Some Agencies Hold in Advising Firms on Ride Sharing

When the South Coast Air Quality Management District adopted Regulation 15 in October, it spawned a whole new business.

Local consultants are now looking at a potentially vast market of employers who need advice on complying with the new ride-sharing rule.

But there is an obstacle. A few publicly funded agencies are already doing some of the same things the consultants want to charge for, and that miffs the consultants.

Regulation 15 requires every employer of more than 100 workers to persuade those employees to share rides or use mass transit. The objective is meet federal requirements and clean up the nation’s dirtiest air by getting more cars off the roads.

The incentive: The Air Quality Management District, a state agency, is empowered to levy thousands of dollars in fines on businesses that don’t comply.

Three traffic consultants say they make up the vanguard of this new business: Ekistic Management Consultants in Los Angeles, Transportation Management Services in Pasadena, and Crain & Associates in Los Angeles.

Transportation Management, for instance, just hired three people and is considering hiring another.

“We think it will be a very big business,” said Denise Watts, operations manager at the company.

All three companies existed before Regulation 15. Most of their business involved advising developers on how to get new office parks approved by reducing their volume of traffic.

The oldest of the bunch, Ekistic was born in the energy crisis of 1979, when “employers got interested in car-pooling just to get their employees to work,” President Donald Torluemke said.

Regulation 15, however, has started to bring in a lot more employers with a heightened sense of urgency about the heavy fines.

“We’re hearing from a lot of companies who’ve never been in this game before,” Torluemke said.

For a fee, these companies will do the necessary research, write a traffic management plan for a company and then train a company employee to run the program. The idea is to convince employees that they can get to work as quickly by van-pooling or car-pooling, for instance, then making it easier by helping subsidize the van pools.

Three-year-old Transportation Management won’t say how much all that advice might cost. But its top consultant bills at the rate of $80 an hour.

Jesse Glazer, a senior associate at Crain, says his rates vary greatly.

“Some projects cost as little as $3,000 to $4,000,” he said. “More likely, a project can be in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. It depends upon how much they want us to do for them and how much they’re willing to do for themselves.”

At Ekistic--which is the Greek word for urban planning--a traffic management plan can cost from $5,000 to $10,000.

The consultants promise to get the plan approved by the Air Quality Management District, which began sending letters to the area’s largest employers in July requesting a plan. Employers of more than 500 are being notified now; employers of more than 200 begin getting their letters in January; and employers of more than 100 get theirs in January, 1990.

Once a company receives the letter, it has three months to submit a plan. And the Air Quality Management District isn’t fooling around: It promises fines of up to $25,000 a day for not filing a plan. And once it is filed, the company has got to stick to it.

Meanwhile, more consultants--including traditional firms in fields such as urban planning and traffic engineering--are said to be getting into the business.

“It’s fair to say there are a lot of them out there,” said a spokesman for AQMD.

“Since the letters just began going out, we don’t have a feel yet on whether they’re getting clients.”

Toyota Motors USA, which is based in Torrance, recently hired Ekistic to draw up a traffic management plan.

“We didn’t have the resources to develop our own proposal,” said spokeswoman Debra Sanchez. “In the long run, it’ll be well worth it to us. We’ll have the knowledge and the internal resources to redevelop the plan as we grow.”

Companies have developed their own traffic management programs over the years. Alpha Microsystems in Santa Ana, for example, launched a ride-sharing program in December, 1987.

“We’re a relatively small company, so it was our belief that we could best handle it ourselves,” said spokeswoman Peggy McCrarnie, mentioning that the firm employs close to 300 workers in Orange County. “However, in light of the new regulations, we are considering having a professional redevelop our proposal.”

Now that it looks like this type of consulting could become big business, friction is beginning to develop between the private consultants and some publicly funded agencies that got into traffic management programs when they weren’t as sexy or as profitable.

The Orange County Transit District, which operates the county’s bus system, has been offering advice to employers on ride sharing and other ways of reducing traffic for several years.

Both the consultants and the district run $100-a-day seminars for employers.

“The private sector can do what they’re doing, and you could argue that their resources could be better deployed,” said Ekistic’s Torluemke.

That is not quite so, says the transit district, which says it is not really in competition with the consultants. The district says it won’t write a plan for a company, for instance, but will only give advice.

“We don’t write the programs for the companies and we don’t help run them,” said Claudia Kith, a spokeswoman for the transit district.

“We’re just providing them with information.”

And now it looks like some consultants may be eyeing another potentially lucrative service provided by publicly funded agencies: computerized networks that match riders to car pools or van pools. Both the Orange County Transit District and Commuter Computer in Los Angeles offer the service.

That is another service that private consultants could provide, said Torluemke, who is trying to develop his own computer network to sell to companies.

“It hinders technology. It’s like having Ma Bell sitting there with a monopoly,” he said.

“And the technology doesn’t move as fast because you don’t have competing products.”

Times staff writers Rod McCullom and Floyd Whaley contributed to this report