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Transportation is one of the biggest challenges facing welfare-to-work employees. Many welfare recipients want to work, but have no access to reliable transportation. Studies have shown that only six percent of welfare recipients have reliable cars and many find jobs in the suburbs where public transportation is not always convenient. UPS recognizes this problem and is working to solve it in many areas of the country.

Below are brief examples of UPS's creative approach to solving transportation issues.

• Chicago, Illinois: UPS has worked proactively with the local transit authority, PACE, to create public transportation links between UPS jobs and the communities where employment opportunities are scarce. Since August 1998, the number of UPS employees taking PACE buses to work has nearly tripled from 700 people to 2,000. Each day 40 buses bring employees into the center and 35 take them home. Nearly one-third of the UPS facility’s 6,500 employees use the bus service.
  
  
• Dallas-Ft. Worth, Texas: UPS is a member of the Transportation Task Force Group for the DFW Work Coalition, a group of public and private leaders that seek to combine their resources. UPS partnered with American Airlines, DFW Airport, and Hilton to collect data on where welfare recipients live, where current employees in need of reliable transportation live and what shifts they work. The information collected was used to form creative solutions to transportation issues.
  
  
• Philadelphia, Pa.: The UPS regional air operation in Philadelphia lies across the river from Camden, NJ, where many qualified welfare recipients need jobs. To bring workers from Camden across the river to Philadelphia, UPS implemented a bus system that was later taken over by the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA). This effort has grown to more than 80 buses operating today.
  
  
• Louisville, Ky.: In Bardstown, only 40 miles south of Louisville, the state Department for Employment Services offered to provide a job search and skills training program for area welfare recipients to prepare them for part-time jobs at UPS. Again, transportation from Bardstown to the UPS air hub in Louisville was a problem. Working together, UPS and DES started a bus system that boards at a Bardstown shopping center and arrives at the UPS facility in time for the employees’ shifts.
  
  
• Hartford, Conn.: In 1997, UPS opened a new facility at the Bradley International Airport in Connecticut and joined the National Urban League in a local search for qualified employees. Through this effort, UPS hired 25 people off welfare and contracted with a van service to provide a five-day-per-week bus system to and from a central location to the UPS hub.
  
  
• Worcester, Mass.: UPS subsidizes transportation to and from its facility in Worcester. By coordinating bus schedules with the local transit authority, WRTA, UPS now has daily service to and from all shifts at this facility. A new transportation venture will provide a key link from two economically distressed areas, Fitchburg and Leominster.
  
  
• Oakland, Calif.: UPS participates in a Transportation Roundtable with the City of Oakland’s Life Enrichment Agency. The Roundtable was instrumental in persuading the city council to implement a Night Owl bus service to provide public transportation service from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

• UPS Public Relations
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