Raising Bus Fares

By proposing to raise bus fares to balance their budget (May 28), the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, in typical Los Angeles fashion, chooses style over substance. They reject the substance of providing transportation for people who need and use it (the 75,000 daily bus passengers who will be lost) for the style of rail-transit projects that will probably never generate 75,000 new transit riders.

With one-quarter of the current MTA budget going toward rail construction projects, the future of transportation in Los Angeles is bleak. The MTA will have to continue cannibalizing the bus system, which provides the overwhelming bulk of public transportation in L.A., to pay the ever-increasing costs of rail projects. I do not blame only the MTA board for this; they merely reflect the current political and funding climate that promotes building monuments (rail systems) rather than solving problems (providing transportation).

KEITH PRICE

Los Angeles

* The people in Los Angeles who need the bus should not be made to bear another rate increase. Why is this so easy for the MTA to ignore? How do they so conveniently lose interest in their riders--those who have the least ability to absorb added costs, who are not clogging the roads with cars--just the old, the poor, the disabled, the young trying to get back and forth?

We threw away the Red Car, then we started digging a subway nobody really wants here in earthquake town. Transit is a public trust. It needs to be there, to be cheap, and it needs to be run for the benefit of riders, not the MTA. I suggest bus fare be returned to 59 cents and the balance of the budget derived from a gasoline tax, and for further savings take a good look at who is running the MTA.

JOHN DAVID

North Hollywood