Officials Say RTD Has Few Problem Drivers

The number of Southern California Rapid Transit District drivers who may have operated buses with invalid licenses is only a tiny fraction of what has recently been reported, district officials said today.

All of the bus drivers now on the road have valid credentials, and it appears the number who may have had invalid licenses before recent investigations began was at worst a little over 1% of the district’s 5,000 drivers, RTD officials said.

The conclusions were presented by RTD General Manager John Dyer after an intensive two-week investigation of reports published by the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner that one in eight bus operators had problems with their licenses. Dyer attributed the discrepancies largely to problems in the Department of Motor Vehicles record keeping system.

Final Conclusions Next Week

At the same time, Dyer’s final conclusions on how many bus operators may have been driving without proper credentials will not be available until next week.

Dyer said that the district checked DMV records for the last several weeks but still must complete a “major effort” over the next two months to bring driver records fully up to date. Based on current records, however, Dyer said the problems of drivers with suspended licenses and other violations identified in The Herald-Examiner “are greatly exaggerated, if not totally invalid,” because they failed to take into account the DMV’s lag time in record-keeping.

Dyer said that as of today, all 4,700-plus RTD drivers have both the required Class II license and medical card mandated by state law for transit drivers. The RTD study showed that during an eight-day period beginning Sept. 19, the number of drivers without proper credentials was at a high of 52. By last Friday, after an effort by the district to push its drivers to conform to state requirements, that had dwindled to two drivers.

Most Had Credentials

The RTD also found, after checking DMV reports, that due to the lag time, all but seven of the 51 drivers reported in the Herald-Examiner as lacking proper credentials actually had them.

Dyer blamed much of the recent adverse publicity about drivers on the DMV’s record-keeping. Although noting that the DMV system was never intended to provide the completely up-to-date status of a driver’s record, Dyer said the district will be working in the next several months to improve the record-keeping procedures.

“While extremely important to Los Angeles and RTD, the records of RTD operators are an extremely small component of the total DMV records system,” Dyer said.