Shortly after midnight on March 16, hundreds of 7C students received a puzzling email from Uber.
“We’re just letting you know that your CLAREMONT DIAL-A-RIDE – Public $2.50 (3) voucher has been discontinued by the provider, and is no longer available to use,” the brief message read.
Most students were probably not thinking about Claremont Dial-a-Ride that morning. It was the Monday of the Claremont Colleges’ spring break — but the city-funded service, which provides users with heavily discounted on-demand rides around Claremont and to select locations nearby — had rapidly gained popularity among 7C students in the preceding months.
Despite the automated message from Uber, Claremont Dial-a-Ride still offers $2.50 trips to registered users through Uber. But now, trips must be booked through the Pomona Valley Transportation Authority (PVTA)’s new integrated “Ride PVTA” app before being passed off to the Uber platform.
The switch to the new app may soon be remembered as the least of the changes coming to the Dial-a-Ride service.
In February, the City Council approved a “cost-containment strategy” for the service, which includes more than doubling general public fares to $7 and cutting the program’s hours of operation. Those changes may come into effect as soon as July, after a legally required study and public comment period is completed.
The City Council also voted to immediately cut service to neighboring Montclair, California, citing concerns that too many Claremont Colleges students were using the service to shop at the Target supermarket located there.
The changes come as 7C students’ Dial-a-Ride usage has spiked since the service began its partnership with Uber in 2024, raising concerns about the program’s sustainability. By November 2025, the Claremont Colleges had grown from a negligible source of Dial-a-Ride users to the origin or destination of more than 74 percent of trips, according to the cost-containment report presented by PVTA and city staff to the City Council.
Currently, Claremont Dial-a-Ride provides on-demand rides to the general public from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sundays. The service does not require users to live within Claremont, but they must be registered with PVTA in advance, a process that can be completed online.
Changes to the service have caused confusion at the Claremont Colleges.
Dial-a-Ride user Julianna Aparicio CM ’29 questioned whether the adoption of the Ride PVTA app had been publicized.
“It’s really nice that they provide these services for our students. I just thought it was weird they didn’t tell us about the switch,” Aparicio said.
Based on email correspondence with PVTA Administrative Manager Vanessa Nalbandian, the authority did announce the change to Dial-A-Ride users on Feb. 8, although the Ride PVTA app did not become functional until mid-March. A text message about the change was later sent to users on April 7, more than three weeks after the termination of the in-app Uber vouchers.
Students have also complained of difficulties navigating the new app.
“I just can’t figure out how to order [a ride] on the new app. Like, every time I try to order it, somehow, like it shows there’s no rides,” Aparicio continued.
When users search for rides on the app, the default setting to look for the “Next Available” ride often shows that no rides are available. However, selecting the “Leave At” option allows users to book a ride immediately by specifying the current time.
Booking a ride also requires manually changing the payment option from cash to credit card for every transaction to avoid an error message. Ultimately, the Ride PVTA platform books an Uber ride for the user, which they can then track through the Uber app.
Both the implementation of the Ride PVTA app and the City Council’s approval of cost-saving measures ultimately stem from a modernization of Claremont Dial-a-Ride, which has made the service a victim of its own success. Before PVTA partnered with Uber to help operate the service in 2024, Dial-a-Ride mostly served seniors and people with disabilities unable to drive, according to the report to the City Council. Though service to the general public existed then, college students were likely deterred from booking Dial-a-Ride trips by the inconvenience of having to book a ride well in advance over the phone. Though integration with Uber replaced this process with a familiar interface, the City Council did not anticipate that the partnership would lead to a dramatic increase in ridership.
At the same time that the City Council approved the PVTA’s “cost-containment” strategies four hours into its Feb. 10 meeting, they voted to raise the program’s funding for the 2025–2026 fiscal year from $314,000 to $1,033,000, drawing on dwindling leftover funds from federal COVID relief packages to temporarily plug the gap created by the spike in student ridership.
In their report, PVTA staff made a series of recommendations to reduce annual Dial-A-Ride spending back to approximately $650,000 per year, still more than double previous spending levels.
The recommendation to immediately end service to the Montclair Target, which staff said had been heavily used by college students, was projected to save the city about $100,000 annually.
In the meeting, Vice-Mayor and City Councilmember Ed Reese asked staff whether PVTA could prevent 7C students from taking subsidized rides to the Montclair Place mall or the Montclair Transit Center. To address this, Councilmember Jed Leano proposed cutting service to the entire Montclair service area, noting that Foothill Transit’s multiple bus routes between the Claremont Village and Montclair were free for college students through the Class Pass program. This amendment was approved along with the rest of the recommendations.
The recommendations also included beginning the longer public input process legally required to raise fares from between $2.50 and $4.50 to between $7 and $9, and to reduce service hours to 7 a.m. through 8 p.m. for all customers — including senior/disabled users — targeting a July 1 implementation date for both changes. The PVTA has not increased Dial-a-Ride fares since 2013.
PVTA is expected to issue an official notice of these changes in May. Public meetings will then be held in June, with options to join via videoconference or to submit written public comments. If the changes are once again approved by the City after the public input period has concluded, the Dial-a-Ride fare for one-way trips within Claremont will increase to $7 before the beginning of the 2026-2027 academic year. The price of a comparable Uber trip scheduled without Claremont Dial-a-Ride varies with distance, time and other factors, but a ride from the Claremont Village to Pitzer College would likely cost between $8 and $15.
In correspondence with TSL, Nalbandian stated that PVTA staff had consulted with contacts at the Claremont Colleges to write the cost-containment report’s section about alternative transportation for students, but was unsure whether students themselves had been directly consulted during the report’s preparation.
Though it was not intended to do so, the transition to the Ride PVTA app alone may have reduced ridership for a time.
On a recent Dial-a-Ride trip, the author spoke with a driver who said they had been driving for Uber for over ten years. The driver had never heard of Claremont Dial-a-Ride, but they corroborated an increase in short trips taken by college students around Claremont in the second half of 2025, likely due to Dial-a-Ride’s availability within the Uber app.
The driver stated that the author’s April 6 ride was the first such trip they had received through a separate platform, making it their first Claremont Dial-a-Ride trip since the service’s in-app Uber vouchers were canceled on March 15th.
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