By Bill Slocum
Contributing Editor
After teetering on the verge of oblivion, the Greenwich Safe Rides program is back in business, providing free-ride service 72 nights a year for teenagers unable to drive themselves home. Business, organizers say, has been good. Sometimes too good.
Take Halloween. Not quite two months after the program resumed full-time under the auspices of the Transportation Association of Greenwich (TAG), a dozen or so teenage volunteers and their adult support staff found themselves in a perfect storm. Halloween fell on a Saturday, with an extra hour on the clock due to daylight-savings time.
“Must have been a full moon, too,” noted James Boutelle, TAG’s executive director and a volunteer driver at Safe Rides many nights.
Calls poured in from different parts of town, most from intoxicated or otherwise impaired teenage partiers who needed help getting home safely. With only two cars in operation that night, Safe Rides volunteers had more than they could handle just answering calls.
“The phone probably rang upwards of 100 to 200 times,” says Peter Negrea, a senior at Greenwich High School who is Greenwich Safe Rides’ president. “We ended up being backed up ten calls deep. There were a lot of clients that night.”
“Clients” is the term employed by Safe Rides personnel for those they take home. Some need the service because they find themselves out late at night in an unfamiliar neighborhood. In most cases, clients are not sober enough to drive themselves, and know better than to try.
Safe Rides operates Friday and Saturday nights during the school year from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., or 2 a.m. on prom nights. Hosted for many years by the Greenwich chapter of the American Red Cross, the program was picked up by TAG after a period of being run out of the Greenwich Police Department, where it had operated on a sporadic basis.
The police solution was needed for a time to keep the service alive, Safe Rides leaders say, but was never optimal: Those most in need of Safe Rides were leery of reaching out to the law. Now run out of the TAG office across the street from St. Catherine of Siena in Riverside, Safe Rides offers callers near-total anonymity; no last names written down, no records kept.
“The whole point is to just make sure the kids get home safe,” says Victoria Rojo, a senior at Greenwich High and one of Safe Rides’ team leaders.
Rojo says she knows about the risks of underage drunk driving second-hand; her mother grew up losing friends that way. “It’s not something I want to happen to someone I know,” she says.
Halloween was by far the busiest night Safe Rides encountered, at least since last spring’s proms, when high demand was expected. Most nights are quieter, like last Saturday.
A group of teenagers gathered around a table in the TAG office that evening, swapping stories. At a desk near a back window, Maxine McMillan, a Greenwich High junior working her first night ever as a Safe Rides volunteer, kept one eye on the phone at her elbow. Suddenly it began to ring. A light flashed beside the receiver as she picked it up.
“Safe Rides,” she said, pencil at the ready. “Where are you calling from?”
Around her, the other teenagers rose from their chairs, to work out who would accompany professional driver J.C. Aguilar on the call. Maria Jose Falcon and Lily Nobunaga, both Greenwich High juniors, were quickest to volunteer. Aguilar, a soccer coach in his spare time, was in the middle of making his first cup of coffee; now it would have to wait until he returned.
The coffee would be cold by then; this call was for eight different clients living all around town, from Old Greenwich to Glenville. Sometimes Safe Rides trips get quite involved.
There are many rules of Safe Rides, the first of them being not to talk about Safe Rides outside of the TAG building. Often, Safe Rides volunteers recognize clients, but that is to be forgotten Mondays at school. Another rule is the adult driver; while Safe Rides began in 1982 with teenagers driving as well as running the program, these days insurance costs are too high to permit that. Then there is the rule about destinations: You don’t have to pay, but the only place you get taken is home.
“We’re not a taxi service,” Boutelle says.
The teen volunteers who accompany clients on rides are charged with such tasks as helping drivers find callers and managing unruly passengers. While many passengers are visibly drunk or stoned, they are seldom unruly.
“Actually, they are usually very nice,” Falcon says. “Most don’t really talk, but they do say thank you.”
There are eight different Safe Rides teams, which tend to cluster around certain social groups. Saturday night, for example, there were a preponderance of girls from the Greenwich High crew team, reflecting team member Rojo’s work as a recruiter.
Negrea explains that while there are a lot of Greenwich High kids in the program, other teams are composed of Brunswick boys or Convent of the Sacred Heart girls. “We can cover each other’s proms that way,” he says.
Sometimes the question gets asked: Does Safe Rides enable underage drinking?
“It still shocks me when people say you are promoting drinking when you do this,” Negrea says. “They would drink if we were there or not. They would probably drive if we weren’t there.”
On Saturday evening, the phone rang again. Someone in Cos Cob this time, not sure of the address. All the caller could say for sure was there was a park nearby. As J.C. was still out with the minivan, Boutelle went out instead, in part to make sure the caller wasn’t so drunk as to require medical attention, something Safe Rides tries to be attentive to. Teen volunteer Sophia Salzer, a Greenwich High junior, put away her calculus homework to go with him.
“You really need two drivers, plus one adult on the premises every night,” Boutelle says. “If we run a whole year, 72 nights, it would cost $56,000. That works out to about $770 a night.”
Boutelle says TAG is asking the town of Greenwich to pay a third of that operating cost, which would cover insurance, a serious concern for the program’s future. TAG would raise the rest itself. TAG has the vehicles already, but driving impaired young people is a risk he is concerned will not be easy to insure.
The call in Cos Cob went smoothly, as Boutelle and Salzer were able to find the park from the caller’s description, and the caller was only confused rather than seriously impaired. Meanwhile, Aguilar, Falcon, and Nobunaga returned from their cross-town tour, just in time for a pick-up call from Glory Days diner in central Greenwich. Falcon and Nobunaga laughed as a frustrated Aguilar forewent his coffee, grabbing a chocolate-chip cookie on his way out the door.
In the end, Saturday’s tally was an average one: six calls, 14 clients. Usually there are some 30 rides in a weekend; Negrea thinks of them as 30 potential accidents averted.
One of Negrea’s principal concerns now is grooming juniors and younger teens to take over Safe Rides once he graduates.
“They choose us, because we’re free and dependable and anonymous,” he says.
Safe Rides operates on Friday and Saturday nights, 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. The number to call is (203) 869-8445.
