Valley Commentary : Revamped Bus System a Vital Patch in Transit Plan : While battles over rail service are being waged, short-term, less expensive solutions can ease traffic with a minimum of environmental damage. One of them is restructuring the bus system.

Public transportation agencies have allocated $500,000 for a major study designed to restructure bus service in the San Fernando Valley. It could not have come at a better time, because the much-publicized rail projects under way or under study will take decades to complete.

Any solution to our transportation problems must recognize a fundamental reality: Transit in the Valley is a patchwork quilt. Thousands of jobs are intermixed with thousands of residents.

This creates a vast crisscrossing of people going from home to work. And a huge number of non-work-related trips are generated each day.

As battles over rail are being fought, short-term, less expensive solutions can ease traffic with a minimum of environmental damage. One of them is restructuring the bus system.

First, here are some other transit options that might appear to offer hope for relief:

* Street-widening and cutting through existing streets--very promising, with huge potential. What is needed is a commitment by the public and government that some streets must serve as major arteries. Oxnard Street, Riverside Drive, Saticoy Street, Magnolia Boulevard and other thoroughfares should be considered for major improvements. The removal of parking from some arteries, such as Victory Boulevard, should be considered. So should the “completion” of some streets, like Oxnard, now interrupted by the Sepulveda Basin.

* Reverse lanes and one-way streets--of limited value. Traffic experts don’t support reverse lanes unless there is a heavy a.m./p.m. traffic split, which is lacking on most Valley streets. And most of our major thoroughfares are too far apart to make one-way streets practical.

* High-occupancy-vehicle or exclusive bus lanes--possibly useful, but 79% of Valley drivers drive alone.

* Heavy rail--of limited use because it is inflexible and ill-suited to the Valley, which lacks a central business district where people go every morning and return from at night. The Northridge earthquake proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the freeway is unsuitable as a site for an elevated train, whose collapse would close both the rail and freeway systems.

* Electric trolleys--a good idea, but planners are moving in the wrong direction by rejecting it. Trolleys are pollution-free, quiet and flexible. They may either share the roadway with others or have exclusive lanes. They can be realigned to meet changing demand, require less maintenance than internal combustion engines and satisfy many federal mandates. In December, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority ignored all this and, citing budget problems, voted to delay indefinitely its countywide trolley project.

This brings us back to buses, which do not serve Valley riders well for a variety of reasons.

Our present grid system is expensive to operate, since it relies mostly upon large, 80-passenger local buses during both daytime and evening. The buses make frequent stops, discouraging riders. Going from Studio City to Chatsworth, for example, requires a bus ride of an hour or more with dozens of stops.

*

The grid system provides nothing approximating door-to-door service. Large buses run only on main thoroughfares, so passengers must get to their bus stops and final destinations on their own.

For these and other reasons, only 3% of residents use the bus system.

Some cities have successfully installed a “pulsed,” or hub-and-spoke, timed transfer bus system. Our planners should look closely at express buses, minivans and computer-based scheduling.

A pulsed bus system has two components--express buses and local minivans. The minivans carry 10 to 12 passengers, perhaps 30 on some runs, and circulate through neighborhoods picking up passengers and taking them to express stops.

Express buses take passengers to destinations with only a few stops. When the passengers arrive, they take another minivan to their exact destinations.

During rush hours, minivans, express buses and other vehicles should depart at predetermined times. During slow periods, the rate of arrivals and departures could be adjusted to meet changing demand. Computers would track the arrival and departures of buses at major points and readjust the speed of the system to match that of traffic. A minivan could wait a few minutes for an express bus caught in traffic. In late evening, express buses could be replaced by minivans.

The system would save a lot of money. Light rail costs $3.40 per passenger mile; heavy rail, $1.50; city buses, 35 cents. A 10- to 12-passenger minivan costs only 10 to 15 cents per passenger mile.

Minivans can operate on narrow city and hillside streets. They are quieter and require less-skilled operators than big buses. They could be run by private contractors. At night they could replace underused large buses. In some cases it might be thriftier to drop buses and vans altogether and simply route a taxi.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if transit planners and politicians explored these ideas and they worked? Think of what could be done for this city with the billions of dollars that would be saved.