RTD’s Critics Say It Could Learn From ‘Big Blue Bus’

The streets are quiet, and the low, morning sun is jabbing between the long building shadows in Santa Monica’s seaside, downtown business district. Just now, the main attraction is not the trendy boutiques or cafes, but the transit buses lumbering from stop to stop, scooping up small knots of work- and school-bound passengers.

Buses from two of the region’s better-known public transit systems--the huge Southern California Rapid Transit District and the smaller Santa Monica city bus line--crisscross and trail each other and, at some stops, riders can board either and head down Interstate 10 to central Los Angeles’ corporate and government office centers.

This is a time and place where some of the striking, bus-bench-level disparities in the cost and quality of transit in Los Angeles County come into sharp focus.

The 40-minute ride to downtown Los Angeles on Santa Monica’s “Big Blue Bus” costs 80 cents. For the same ride, the Southern California Rapid Transit District freeway flyer costs $1.90, and that fare will go higher on July 1.

However, bargain basement fares are only part of the reason many of these commuters choose blue.

“I find it depressing to ride those dirty (RTD) buses,” said Nina O’Connor, who lives in the Venice area and goes out of her way to ride the Blue Bus to her downtown Los Angeles job as a social worker.

“Santa Monica lines don’t run as late”--meaning they do a better job of staying on schedule--said Paula Mirsky, who was transferring from one Blue Bus to another at 4th Street and Santa Monica Boulevard.

Rushing to board a Century City-bound RTD bus was Miriam Goodwin of Venice, who regularly rides both systems. “I find the (Santa Monica) bus drivers much friendlier. . . . They seem to enjoy their job,” she said. “They say, ‘Good morning.’ ”

With the recent RTD decision to raise fares--the basic ride will go from 85 cents to $1.10 next month--the debate has been refueled over just how effectively and efficiently the huge, financially struggling agency is operating.

Consider this: The buses rolling past those downtown Santa Monica stops each morning all cost about the same, approximately $180,000 each, and the drivers, members of the same United Transportation Union, make roughly the same wage, a top hourly rate of about $13 to $14. However, county taxpayers and RTD riders are putting out an average of $68--nearly 60% more than Santa Monica--each hour an RTD bus is in service.

Considerable gaps in costs also exist between the RTD and other Los Angeles County public bus systems, such as Long Beach, Torrance and Montebello. The RTD’s hourly costs range from 32% to 55% higher than those systems.

Not Entirely Fair

These are not comparisons the RTD invites or some transit experts believe are entirely fair.

RTD’s defenders say the district’s costs are higher because the agency is trying to meet dispersed and diverse responsibilities spread over a 2,200-square-mile area. It serves both poor, inner-city, transit-dependent areas where buses are often severely overcrowded, as well as high-income, auto-rich suburbs where buses may often run nearly empty--and everything in between, they say.

“The reality is the RTD is the regional carrier,” said RTD President Jan Hall. “When you have a system as large as the RTD, with a legislative mandate to serve Los Angeles County and surrounding (areas) . . . some of the lines will be more productive than others.”

Santa Monica and other smaller bus systems have the luxury of serving areas that are “compact and well-defined,” Hall said.

The RTD’s 2,400-bus fleet carries more than 20 times the number of riders as Santa Monica’s and is second in size only to New York’s.

The traditional comparison for the RTD has been with a handful of Eastern, big-city bus systems, and in that company the district falls somewhere in the middle.

For example, New York’s bus costs per hour are about the same as the RTD’s; Washington’s are considerably higher, and Chicago’s considerably lower.

Increasingly, however, Los Angeles area transportation policy makers are turning away from that type of comparison as a way to evaluate the RTD. Instead, they are using the Santa Monica-type comparison as they search for ways to stretch their limited funds to meet demands for more and better bus service. The question many are raising is: Why should riders and taxpayers continue to pay so much more for bus service that many judge to be inferior?

“We have a pot of money to spend and in spending that money we have to get the best buy we can get in L.A. County,” said Jim Sims, the top fiscal analyst for the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which controls local transit purse strings. “It doesn’t matter what it costs in New York or Chicago.”

Cost, Service the Keys

Sepulveda Democrat Richard Katz, who chairs the state Assembly Transportation Committee, agrees. “To the person on the street, the issue is what does a (bus ride) cost and does it get them where they want to go. All the other arguments are irrelevant.”

Added Katz: “It appears Santa Monica is making a whole lot of (better) decisions that have nothing to do with size.”

The new cost-conscious attitude, which has been endorsed in varying degrees both by the conservatives in control of the county Board of Supervisors and liberal Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, has already begun to change the face of the region’s transit network.

Working with the county Transportation Commission, the City of Los Angeles last year created what amounts to its own, small bus system--the most visible part of which operates as “Commuter Express.” Using private bus companies, the city took over shuttle services in the downtown area, Westwood and San Pedro, as well as a dozen Valley, Westside and South Bay freeway routes that the RTD was finding too costly to operate. Preliminary reports indicate that ridership is up, customers are happier and operating costs are down, compared to the RTD, said Ed Rowe, acting general manager of the city Department of Transportation.

Sharp Differences

Likewise, a recently approved plan by county Supervisor Pete Schabarum and city officials in San Gabriel Valley to secede from the RTD and form an independent bus system rested heavily on the sharp differences in operating costs between the RTD and the Santa Monica and Long Beach bus lines.

Earl Clarke, head of the RTD’s 5,000-member bus drivers’ union, said the Santa Monica-type comparisons are “very unfair” and part of the camouflage for an attack on RTD unions.

Run in High-Crime Areas

As an example, Clark said, the municipal bus lines’ costs for worker compensation claims are far less because they do not operate in high-crime areas. “We have much more dangerous routes. . . . (Their) drivers are less prone to be attacked and assaulted,” he said.

Gary Spivack, the RTD’s director of planning, added: “We are operating in the most congested corridors of the city (and) we put a lot more miles on our buses than other operators. We are more prone to breakdowns.”

And although Santa Monica and RTD drivers wages may be close, “there are significant differences” in other parts of the labor agreement that add to cost, Spivack said. Work rules that govern such things as absenteeism, which is well above Santa Monica’s rate, is one. An outside audit in 1986 found that unexcused absences at the RTD were 50% higher than in other large bus systems, a matter that is now a key issue in labor talks.

But Spivack also argued that the RTD “provides services no one else provides--like transit police.” The real question, he said, should be: “Is the region getting a lot of service for the money it pays?” The answer, he said, is yes.

But some analysts say there are simply too many layers of costly centralized management in an operation the size of the RTD.

Peak of Efficiency

“As a broad generality, bus systems reach their peak of efficiency in the 200-to-250-(bus) range,” Sims said. “As you add (management) layers in and get more distance between the people at the top making decisions and the people at the bottom actually providing service . . . the less efficient you are.”

A recent study of California transit systems found this to be particularly true in the area of bus maintenance--where for each hour of bus service RTD costs are 86% higher than Santa Monica’s.

“In the maintenance area, there are dis-economies of scale,” said Mike Ferreri, a Philadelphia-based senior vice president with Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc., a national consulting firm.

Ferreri’s division has studied transit agencies across the country and prepared the study of bus maintenance costs for the California Department of Transportation.

The RTD prides itself in being an industry leader in acquiring large management information systems and state-of-the-art bus maintenance facilities and equipment.

But transit agencies are paying more than once for a lot of the new high-tech gear, Ferreri said. “Of the technological innovations that have been introduced . . . a lot of them have actually raised costs,” Ferreri said.

Kept Small and Simple

Santa Monica, which was judged one of the best-run bus systems in the country last year by the American Public Transit Assn., has kept it small and simple.

The bulky, 20-year-old mechanical calculator sitting on the city transportation director’s desk in Santa Monica is both symbolic and functional. “I never made the switch to a 10-key (calculator),” Jack F. Hutchison said.

Hutchison has been cautious about a lot of high-tech transit equipment. His agency resisted the switch to so-called “advanced design” buses--the sleeker-looking coaches that the RTD bought a few years ago and now is finding need major rehabilitation midway through their normal life span. Santa Monica also tested and then rejected a computerized customer information system because the office staff could come up with the answers faster on their own. “The computer didn’t have a heart,” said Bob Ayer, one of Hutchison’s assistants.

But the most important advantage Hutchison has is that his entire operation is within his management grasp. The view out of his large, second-story office window is of his bus parking area. He sees most of his coaches come and go each day and picks up the phone if he spots anything he does not like.

If scheduling or route adjustments need to be made, Hutchison does it himself. There are no elaborate studies, no planners. “We’re small enough we’re able to focus our attention on what’s going on,” said Hutchison, adding that a key part of controlling costs is closely matching the amount of service on the streets to demand. “Running empty seats doesn’t help anyone.”

Single Dispatch Room

All of his drivers pass through a single dispatch room a couple of doors down the hall. Each driver usually drives the same bus, a practice that some transit analysts say results in greater employee pride, cleaner buses and more pressure to keep on top of maintenance problems.

Some observers say the RTD is moving to contain its costs. After two years of public criticism of its management and in the face of the new competition for local transit funds, driver absenteeism has begun to come down, the work force has been trimmed by nearly 1,000 since 1986, new controls have been placed on the system’s $20-million worth of parts, and cuts have been made in the tens of millions of dollars paid out annually to those claiming to have been injured in bus accidents.

“I think they are much less stagnant than they were a few years ago. . . . They’ve made a lot of strides,” said Doug Carter, a transit analyst who has studied RTD costs for the county Transportation Commission. “But the effort has to keep going in that direction.”

Some large transit systems have taken more painful steps to cut costs.

Chicago is an often-cited example. Its bus system carries about the same number of passengers as the RTD and their buses operate approximately the same number of hours each year, although it runs fewer miles and serves a more compact area. For fiscal 1987, the same period used for the Santa Monica comparison, the RTD’s costs per hour were 36% higher.

Costs Trimmed 15%

Chicago’s big retrenchment came a few years ago when the transit system was on the verge of financial collapse. Ferreri’s firm was called in by former Mayor Jane Byrne and told to reduce operating costs. Costs were trimmed 15% in eight months, Ferreri said. “We got rid of some of the administrative things. It was kind of over-bloated . . . mostly at the lower levels where they had two people doing the job of one,” he said.

In addition, wage increases were postponed and the transit security department--”they were kind of building an empire that didn’t fulfill a whole lot”--was eliminated. Driver absenteeism, which was up in the range of the RTD’s, was cut in half and the number of drivers called in each day to be on stand-by was reduced through tighter management, Ferreri said.

But simply trimming more at the RTD probably may not be the best way to attack the basic cost and quality of service problem, some officials said.

The trend in large metropolitan areas, including Chicago and Washington, is to have multiple bus system operators provide service, transit analysts said. “The RTD is trying to be all things to all people,” said Sims of the transportation commission. “We need to let the RTD do what they do best . . . the heavy urban routes.”

RTD board member Marv Holen, a staunch defender of the district, also has begun to argue that the agency is severely overextended. With funds limited, the quality of service cannot improve as long as the RTD maintains its current quantity of service, Holen told the board recently.

Breaking Down the RTD

County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, the commission chairman, sees the solution in breaking the RTD down into smaller, locally controlled transit systems--in effect, creating more Santa Monicas.

“What has having a big transit system gained us?” asked Mike Lewis, Schabarum’s chief deputy.

Better coordinated service, responded RTD President Hall. She noted that there was a hodgepodge of private and public companies in the early 1960s before service was consolidated into the Metropolitan Transit Authority and then the RTD.

“Are we willing to decentralize to the point we have the situation we had prior the RTD?” she asked. “Passengers could not readily transfer from one line to another. . . . (They) were really at the whim (of the bus companies).”

But Sims noted that the county Transportation Commission, which did not exist as a regional authority in the early 1960s, has assumed responsibility for making sure that the transit systems work together.

Even without breaking them apart, large bus systems such as the RTD can learn from their smaller counterparts, some analysts say. Some suggest creating more of a Santa Monica-type management structure within the RTD, instead of the centralized decision-making that has evolved over the years.

‘Hold People Accountable’

“It doesn’t necessarily mean busting up the organization,” said Ferreri, the consultant. “The basic lesson from the smaller systems is (to) get responsibility pushed down and hold people accountable. . . . That’s what private business is doing today, pushing responsibility down and getting rid of the middle layers.”

Hall said the reality is that restrictions in state statutes and labor agreements have prevented the RTD from managing itself like a business.

“We are prohibited from being efficient,” she said.

SANTA MONICA VS. THE RTD The RTD and Santa Monica bus systems are considerably different in fares, operating costs and size. Santa Monica often wins praise from riders for having lower costs, cleaner buses, more reliable service and friendlier drivers. But RTD officials say they face special problems and added costs because they must serve diverse regional transit needs of a 2,200-square mile area. Some comparisons:

RTD SANTA MONICA Basic fare 85 50 going to $1.10 July 1 Santa Monica to Los $1.90 80 Angeles freeway bus higher after July 1 Transfers 10 Free 25 after July 1 Cost per hour $67 $43 of bus service Boardings per hour 60 64 of bus service Cost per 28 20$ passenger mile Total annual 435 million 18 million boardings Bus fleet 2,400 125 Total employees 8,500 223