Senior Citizens Criticize RTD Service and Rail Projects : Transportation: Some speakers at the hearing contend that future subways won’t do them any good. An official says tight budgets are limiting improvements.

A group of senior citizens in Sherman Oaks complained to officials Thursday that transportation programs are lacking in the San Fernando Valley and that proposed rail projects will be completed too far in the future to benefit them.

The hearing, attended by about 50 senior citizens, was held by Seniors For Action, a Valley senior citizens organization. It was attended by Southern California Rapid Transit District board members Nikolas Patsaouras, Carl W. Raggio and James Tolbert. Patsaouras and Tolbert are also members of the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

The meeting was designed to give senior citizens an opportunity to make suggestions and criticisms about transportation programs in the Valley.

But most of the comments during the more than two-hour meeting were critical of the RTD bus system and the county’s plan to build a rail line through the Valley.

“The Valley has no transportation at all,” longtime Van Nuys resident Cliff Rosett said. “The rail system is going to get everyone downtown, but there is nothing to get us around here. I don’t care about downtown.”

One woman who said she is a longtime bus rider was escorted out of the meeting after she launched into a tirade in which she used profanity to criticize the RTD’s bus service.

“We want quality transportation now,” the unidentified woman shouted as she was led away. Under current construction schedules, the Metro Red Line subway will be extended from Hollywood to North Hollywood by 2001. It will be extended either by a monorail or combination surface-subway line to Woodland Hills by 2015.

“Why do the people in the Valley have to wait until 2015 when most of us won’t even be here?” asked a woman who declined to give her name.

Patsaouras, a Valley resident, said he too would like to improve transportation programs in the area but said his efforts are limited by budget shortfalls and bureaucratic red tape. He urged the senior citizens to call and write to city and county officials to demand that Valley transportation projects get higher priority.

“I agree, the bureaucrats downtown are not going to know your experiences and your problems,” he said. “What I’m telling you is let’s open up the channels of communications.”

He said the RTD is planning to completely reorganize all bus routes in the Valley to better serve residents. The current bus routes were designed more than 20 years ago and need to be revised to reflect the change in demographics, he said.

Tolbert said part of RTD’s problem is lack of money to implement new programs. The district faces a $117-million shortfall this year, he said. “We have more money than a lot of states, and it is not enough,” he said.

One elderly woman complained that senior citizens in Beverly Hills can take advantage of a program that provides subsidized coupons to ride taxis, but no such program exists in the Valley.

Raggio told the woman that the city of Los Angeles oversees taxi programs and not the RTD. But city officials have said that a program to provide senior citizens and the disabled with universal transit scrip--coupons that could be used like cash to pay for taxi, dial-a-ride and bus service--will go into effect citywide in October or January.