Bus Bravos : Riders Applaud RTD’s Beefed-Up Security

It was in the 90s outside and not much cooler inside the lumbering No. 30 bus as it roared out of downtown, heavy with a standing-room-only load of shoppers sweating in the aisles. A few feet from Elaine Howard, a woman whispered, clucked and burbled to herself.

But Howard uttered not a word of complaint. Things were looking up on the RTD these days, she allowed. “I had stopped riding buses for a while. They didn’t show up on time--and the gang members. . . . Last year a lot of the buses were dirty and graffitied up. But this year is better.”

This week, Howard actually saw a couple of transit police from the RTD’s new uniformed bus patrols enforce the system’s no-noshing, no-sipping commandment. “They got on and some lady had a soda. I think they gave her a warning because it was so hot,” she theorized.

Still, Howard’s true love is the new

Blue Line light rail service from Los Angeles to Long Beach, which she rides home to South-Central Los Angeles. “It’s real nice. There’s a lot of security. The sheriffs are so much better. . . . At each stop they get on and check.”

The regulars on the Southern California Rapid Transit District’s sprawling bus system bump along with a certain stoicism that occasionally can blossom into praise. Most have a tale or two of woe about pickpockets, drunks or the guy who exposed himself in the back of the bus.

But for the last few weeks they’ve had some good news--free rides if buses are late and beefed-up security. Most bus patrons don’t have alternatives, anyway.

And hey, it’s better than Russia.

“Very nice, very good. It has conditioning and everything,” was the assessment of Shulim Shuster, recently of Odessa, U.S.S.R., and now of West Hollywood. “This is more comfortable. United States is more comfortable. Russia is very bad, very old bus, very old,” Shuster explained as his relatively new bus trundled down Santa Monica Boulevard.

Bill collector Kelvin Easter has been angling for a free trip under the RTD’s new program of free fares to riders if their bus is more than 15 minutes late. But so far, the RTD has not been cooperative.

“Saturday and Sunday they’re usually never on time,” he said on a Wilshire Boulevard bus as a man with a cast on his arm stretched out on the back seat nearby and took a nap. “Sunday night I tested it to see if I could get a free ride and it was right on time,” Easter recounted with dismay.

Other passengers hadn’t taken much notice of the late-bus, no-pay offer. For one thing, a good many of them would have to slice through the language barrier before they could even begin to negotiate for a free trip. “I no speak English, just a little bit,” they explain with Spanish, Chinese and Eastern European accents as they hold their fingers up, a quarter inch apart, to underscore just how little.

Even without a language problem Paul Weaver hasn’t bothered about the free rides. “I don’t even think about it. I never time the buses. I just run like hell to catch one,” said Weaver, a faithful patron of Los Angeles public transit since 1962. Once aboard, his custom is to head to the back, often with difficulty. As he wrote in a poem he calls “City Buses”: “There’s always room in the rear, but too many rears in the way.”

Riders exhibit more enthusiasm over the news that the RTD is augmenting its undercover police crews with a small number of uniformed transit police who will patrol downtown Broadway and buses countywide.

“I’ve never noticed (undercover) police because they’re not noticeable” said a retired woman with eminent logic as her bus traveled down Pico Boulevard. “I think having police in uniform will be much better. But it’s probably just a fad, for the time being,” she added with a knowing air.

“I’ve had a near robbery,” she continued. “A guy stuck his hand in my purse. I caught him and told him to get his hand out of my purse.” Someone else reached in once and got away with a pack of Kleenex. “I don’t carry a wallet. It’s a bad thing to carry a wallet in your purse.”

On another Pico Boulevard bus, a 21-year-old man said yes, he’d like to see more blue uniforms on the bus. “It’s good. I just saw someone get killed while I was waiting for the bus,” he said matter of factly, his voice expressing neither wonder nor fright. “Somebody got shot. I think he was dead. I guess it was drugs.”

Police later said the shooting victim had survived and was hospitalized in stable condition.

At the stop at the corner of Pico Boulevard and Vermont Avenue, waiting passengers watched drug dealers peddle plastic bags and count up tangles of cash thrust into their hands. A few feet away, a young woman changed her baby’s diaper while street vendors hawked perfume and cigarettes.

RTD riders may at times be late, scared and hot, but they’re rarely bored.