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A free ride home for bar patrons who are too drunk to drive sounds great in theory - especially over the high-spirited New Year's Eve holiday.

But city bar owners and managers say Bernalillo County's Safe Ride program is too slow, it's overloaded and it only works to a certain extent.

"Sometimes it will take them up to two hours to get here," said Esther Zapata, manager of Uptown Sports Bar and Grill, "That's the problem with Safe Ride."

County officials say the program is effective, but they'll look into any complaints about the service and see if it can be improved.

They also point out that a high volume of calls around closing time is the nature of the business.

"If it's 2 in the morning or 1:30 in the morning, there may be some delay based on volume," Deputy County Manager John Dantis said.

Safe Ride, which provides free transportation for people too drunk to drive home from a bar or restaurant, has been operating for 10 years. It runs from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. every Friday and Saturday. This year, the county extended the service to include Super Bowl Sunday, Thanksgiving Eve, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve.

In fiscal year 2007, the program provided rides to 5,247 inebriated individuals, according to a county report. It costs about $115,000 a year, with funds generated by a statewide liquor excise tax.

Bar owners and managers say the 30 to 40 taxi cabs the county pays Albuquerque Cab Co. to supply for the Safe Ride program are not enough to make a difference.

"We call for the taxi service, and that generally takes a good 45 minutes depending on the night and depending on how busy," said Ross Source, manager of the Downtown bar Anodyne. "People won't wait for that. And there's the problem right there."

Source said he has seen many customers leave his bar in frustration without a safe ride home.

"They'll find alternative means, like walking home drunk or biking home drunk," he said. "Which is way better than getting in their car - but they'll get in their car too."

The contract between Bernalillo County and Albuquerque Cab stipulates the Safe Ride service be provided within a 30-minute time frame, Dantis said. If the response is consistently slow due to a high volume, then that is a problem the county will address, he said.

"We will work with the cab company, and if we have information that says that they are not meeting their contractual obligations then we will do everything we can to try to help them and make sure that they are."

Shawkeet Hindi, co-owner of Albuquerque Cab, said his drivers try to respond to Safe Ride calls immediately.

"That's one of the reasons why we have two dispatchers at night," he said.

Hindi said the complaints he receives about the Safe Ride service response time stem from a lack of communication.

"Sometimes, whenever these people call us or the bar calls us, the customer leaves before we get there and they don't let us know," he said. "We make a trip for nothing and waste all that time."

Hindi said the complaint he receives most often is "The cab didn't get here."

"Well, we did get there," he said. "Sometimes, the customer's not ready to go yet or he wants to finish his drink. So, that puts us behind on that call, and we have to go on to the next one. It's a domino effect."

Dantis said the county will work with Albuquerque Cab to refine the Safe Ride program because taxi resources in the county are limited.

He said Albuquerque Cab won the Safe Ride contract because it submitted a competitive proposal and offered more stability than using cabbies who were independent contractors.

"From what I'm hearing, the consistency of having to work with one person who deals with everything rather than independent contractors was a bit better," he said.

The county also plans to extend Safe Ride service to include Sundays from 8 p.m. to midnight, Dantis said. But the additional service might not be enough to convince some bar owners to trust the program again.

Sam Gissing, owner of the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen's Club, said he was so sick of the Safe Ride program's inadequacies that he hired Lucky Boyz Limousine Service to take his inebriated guests home for free tonight.

"From what I've seen, Safe Ride doesn't work," he said. "I have yet to see one ever appear in my parking lot when called. The bottom line I hear from people I've spoken to is that you will have to wait for 45 minutes to an hour, and if the cab doesn't show up then they just drive home."

Gissing said he moved to Albuquerque from West Palm Beach, Fla., to take over the Spearmint Rhino six months ago. He said it didn't take him long to see that the state's DWI problem goes hand in hand with the lack of transportation options.

"I've been in the business for 17 years, and I've worked clubs that are open 24 hours," he said. "And the magnitude of the problem that I've seen here, I've never seen in my life."

Gissing said the county should hire an additional cab company to assist with the Safe Ride program or extend the operating hours of its transportation services in order to better serve Bernalillo County residents.

"I've thought about opening up a cab company here," Gissing said. "It looks like they're in dire need of one."