A new UC Riverside program is making it fun and easy for students to learn how to travel locally and regionally on public transit.

Launched last fall, the Travel Training program has guided 278 participants on more than a dozen trips to destinations including Los Angeles, San Clemente, and Oceanside as of late April. A recent trip to Los Angeles drew 40 people.

The goal is to help students learn how to use public transportation and get comfortable trying it out, said Faith McClure, mobility program coordinator for Transportation Services, who organizes and leads the trips.

The program is particularly aimed at first-year and international students, many of whom have no other means of transportation and may not be familiar with using Southern California transit. However, the trips are open to all students, staff, and faculty members.

McClure said some first-time users of public transit are intimidated by going alone or assume it isn’t safe.

“When you go in a group, and you go with someone who’s local and knows how to navigate the buses and trains, it helps build confidence,” she said.

The program also helps promote UCR’s partnership with the Riverside Transit Agency in which students, staff, and faculty members can ride buses for free by using their R’Card or the transit agency’s GoMobile app. Students also get a 50% discount on the Metrolink regional passenger rail system.

Between the two public transit systems, students can travel to much of the Southern California region.

The Travel Training program has offered daylong weekend destination trips that explore the greater Southern California area to locations such as Little Tokyo in Los Angeles and Knott’s Berry Farm in Orange County. Short evening trips to downtown Riverside and Moreno Valley have been to museums, the Arts Walk, and the mall to help familiarize students with their local surroundings.

Oluwaseyi Omoniyi, an international graduate student in mechanical engineering, first joined a trip to downtown Riverside last fall, shortly after she started at UCR. While she often took public transit in her native Nigeria, she was new to Riverside and thought the trip would be a good way to explore and learn.

Since then, she’s gone on several trips including to the farmer’s market in downtown Riverside, Los Angeles, and the beach in San Clemente.

“Experiencing it with a group of people made it easier and it was also an opportunity to make friends,” Omoniyi said. “A lot of people that went on the trip the first time were new students, international students like me, so it was also an opportunity for me to meet other people and share experiences.”

For each outing, the group meets at Bannockburn Village and takes a bus to their destination. For longer trips, they take the bus to the downtown Riverside Metrolink station, which is part of the Vine Street Mobility Hub, and board a train.

McClure provides participants in advance with links to an itinerary of the stops, a map, and recommends use of a transit app that tracks public transit in real time. She’ll suggest places to see for each trip but participants are encouraged to venture on their own, rejoining at the end for the return trip home.

“They’re very eager to explore and excited to learn about a new area,” she said.

Along the way, they’ll learn basic transit riding skills like how to buy a train ticket, make transit connections, and ask for the bus to make a stop.

Several students have become regulars and gone on multiple trips. 

“We’ve made friends – the travel crew,” said Fana Fraser, a doctoral student in critical dance, who has gone on multiple trips including a recent outing to Oceanside. Fraser lived in New York City where she used public transit often but enjoyed meeting others with the travel training program.

McClure said several students have told her that they’ve since taken public transportation on their own for local errands or to go on a weekend trip.

Nam Bu, a fourth-year physics student, grew up in Orange County and had never taken the bus or train before joining some of the Travel Training trips, he said.

Afterwards, “I tried out taking the train home instead of my dad having to drive me,” he said.

For more information, including signing up for a mailing list of scheduled trips, visit the Transportation Services website.