BLUE LINE JOURNAL : Not All the Bus Riders Are Sold on Train

Each weekday morning, private nurse Remedios D. Catbagan boards an RTD bus in downtown Long Beach and steps off in downtown Los Angeles. It is a routine she has kept day in, day out for nearly five years. Then she decided to try out the sleek new $877-million Metro Rail Blue Line train.

The experiment lasted exactly one trip.

“One time only!” an emphatic Catbagan said Thursday, back in her regular seat aboard the RTD’s Bus 456. “Oh, my God, I will not do it any more. This is the way. If you want to reach downtown, you ride 456.”

Catbagan blames the Blue Line for getting her to work 45 minutes late, due in part to time she spent waiting to transfer to a bus. Now, she is back among the die-hards, the inveterate bus riders who look askance at Metro Rail, who see it as an unproven technology, a thing with possibilities, perhaps, if all the difficulties get worked out.

“I’ve heard horror stories,” said Margaret Everitt, another commuter on Bus 456, who said she might give the Blue Line a try when the crowds die down. “I’ve heard about things like (train) delays in the afternoon. I don’t have that kind of time. To me (the trip downtown) is not a pleasure ride--it’s a necessity.”

Riders on Bus 456--known officially as the Long Beach Freeway Express--travel busing’s equivalent of the Blue Line route. The bus starts near the south end of the 19-mile, 55-minute train route and actually goes further into downtown Los Angeles, all the way to Bunker Hill. The trip is more expensive: $2.30 one-way, compared to $1.10 for the Blue Line once the trains begin charging fares next month. But it is also 10 minutes faster, depending on the freeway traffic.

To bus driver Jim Padilla, who has spent 15 years on the route, “There is no comparison. There is nothing wrong with the Blue Line--I’m glad they have it--but this will go downtown much quicker. It’s one of the sweetest lines there is.”

The route has been well-traveled for years. Ridership on Route 456 is more than 2,000 passengers a day and has been for more than a decade. RTD officials say they are going to closely watch that ridership in the future to determine whether the express route should be kept now that the Blue Line is in place, spokesman Greg Davy said.

“We do not have (ridership) checkers on the buses this week,” Davy said. “(But) we will be monitoring that line over the next year or so. If it’s clear nobody is riding the bus any more, we will cancel the line. But if people keep using it, then we’ll keep it.”

So far, at least, the 456 has retained most of its strong following, according to Padilla. Early morning buses have been nearly full, he said, and his own 8:30 a.m. bus contained about 15 passengers catching the end of the morning rush hour.

Passenger Clark Paul, 40, was on his way to work as bar manager of the downtown Sonora Cafe. Paul is one of those rare commuters who has found the ideal arrangement: The bus picks him up just a block from his apartment on the oceanfront and drops him off just a block from work. Along the way, he sips a little coffee--”Most of the drivers don’t seem to mind”--and reads the newspaper.

He also clips his Sony Walkman to the rail of the window so he can listen to rock music on headphones. A rolling picture of serenity, he wouldn’t give it up if the Blue Line were the last train to Clarksville.

“You can’t get any better than this,” Paul said. “And for $2.30, you really can’t beat it.”

Not that he is dead-set against rail travel: “I’ll probably give it a go (eventually),” Paul allowed. “But to me, it’s still too much an oddity and a novelty. I have no qualms about taking the bus.”

Willis King, 37, a nursing assistant at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Long Beach, was traveling to pick up new eyeglasses at the Beverly Center. He wouldn’t mind taking the train, he said, except that it doesn’t run near the Bixby Knolls area of Long Beach where he lives.

“I’m definitely going to try it. I just haven’t had the time,” he said. “For me, the bus is convenient (and) it’s on time.”

Jamie Jameil, 24, who works for a development firm in Los Angeles, has found that Bus 456 drops her just a block from work, a fact that didn’t keep her from taking the Blue Line home three days this week.

On one of those trips, she said, the train doors stuck and she was delayed for 90 minutes downtown. On another trip, a car ran into her train near the Florence Avenue stop, giving passengers a jolt and disabling the train. She and a crowd of passengers had to switch trains before proceeding homeward.

“I thought I’d try it out,” Jameil said, “but I haven’t been getting home till 7 or 8 (at night). I think I’ll let them work the bugs out.”