Anaheim loves its buses, using them for everything from ferrying visitors to facilitating regional travel in OC’s largest city by size and population.
Tourism backers want more.
Destination marketer Visit Anaheim is exploring an effort to get OC students involved in hospitality with a big bus to visit area schools with information and speakers, building general awareness and attracting future employees.
The program—and the bus—would shuttle hospitality executives and other boosters to kids in middle school through college, working outward from Anaheim.
“It’s all about bringing awareness of the impact tourism has in Orange County, and the 100,000-plus jobs it creates,” said Jay Burress, president and chief executive of Visit Anaheim.
The group wants to raise $150,000 to buy and equip the vehicle for a fall 2020-2021 school year launch.
Burress floated the proposal at Irvine-based Orange County Visitor Association’s annual tourism conference this month at Hilton Anaheim. Burress is former chairman of the group, founded by longtime retired Marriott exec Ed Fuller.
Hotel Mania
Burress got the idea for the as-yet-unnamed project after seeing the John Lennon Foundation’s educational tour bus, a New York-based nonprofit effort that brings music industry execs and other luminaries to U.S. schools for primers on music, arts and digital media.
“I thought, ‘wow, it would be great to have something like that in Orange County,’” Burress said.
Tourism serves as a trade school of sorts, he said.
Its “upward mobility is faster than almost any other industry and it gives people the chance to develop transferrable skills.”
Visit Anaheim is working out program logistics, securing sponsors—and looking for a bus.
City Center
Another city bus program is gaining traction.
FRAN—Free Rides Around the Neighborhood—launched in January.
Ridership is running on all cylinders: early performance “far exceeded expectations,” which had been modeled on similar programs elsewhere, said Diana Kotler, executive director at Anaheim Transportation Network.
Part of OC’s urban “microtransit” support—free tourist buses have run in Laguna Beach, Huntington Beach and Dana Point (see City View, page 63) for instance—buses run along the city’s pedestrian shopping and eatery area along Center Street Promenade and over to the Anaheim Packing House.
And yes, there’s an app for it.
The program’s acronymic moniker FRAN is also meant to conjure memories of Francisca Avila Rimpau: mother of 15, an early settler in the area and woman business owner who helped found one of the city’s first general stores, according to the bus program’s website.
A recent $35.6 million grant will add 10 new electric Polaris GEM cars to the FRAN rideshare system, along with 40 electric buses to Anaheim Transportation Network overall.
Kotler said the bigger fleet means expanded routes, enhancing “imaginative approaches to place-making” and tying disparate destinations together.
New buses arrive next year. Most city vehicles will be zero-emission at that point; the goal is 100%.
