Don’t Spend Transit Dollars Fighting Poor : Better bus service and monthly passes are desperately needed.

On Sept. 1, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority eliminated the lower-cost monthly bus pass and raised the fare per ride by 25 cents. On Sept. 2, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order on the MTA. The Labor/Community Strategy Center and our Bus Riders Union brought the complaint, arguing that the new policies would cause irreparable harm to bus riders. Fares were rolled back to $1.10 and the $42-a-month bus pass was reinstated. If our civil-rights suit--presented by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund--prevails, the MTA will have to seek “non-discriminatory remedies.”

In the tradition of Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Bus Riders Union vs. the MTA addresses the racism of the 1990s, in which race, class and urban poverty have become inextricably intertwined. For the past two years, our activists have testified at every MTA board meeting and budget hearing, met with board members, enlisted support from community organizations and spent hours on the buses to build a constituency for an environmentally sound, attractive, bus-centered system. We argued that the MTA has designed a separate but unequal system in which inner-city bus riders’ interests are sacrificed, not just for a hypothetical white suburban rail rider, but for boondoggle rail projects that (if ever completed) will have few riders of any races. Meanwhile, overcrowding on inner-city bus lines is the highest in the country.

The MTA’s own figures paint a stark picture of racial discrimination against the urban poor. There are 350,000 bus riders who use mass transit every day, compared with only 27,000 train riders. The second-class bus system serves more than 92% of public-transit riders, and since the MTA will not be able to complete many of the rail projects it has begun, rail ridership figures will not get much higher.

Forty-seven percent of MTA riders are Latino (compared with 36% of Los Angeles County’s population), 23% are African American (compared with 11% population), 8% are Asian-Pacific Islander, 1.2% are Native American and 19% are white (compared with 41% of the population.) This ridership of 81% minority, mostly poor, reflects the fact that people of color are dramatically overrepresented in the low-wage and unemployed work forces that are public-transit dependent. A government agency that proclaims, “A typical MTA rider is a person of color (Latino or African American), in her 20s, with a household income of under $15,000 and no car available to use in lieu of public transit” should accept the responsibility to develop a non-discriminatory transit plan.

Instead, the MTA has intentionally diverted “discretionary” funds that could be used for the bus system to serve its train strategy, in which 70% of all discretionary money is used for 8% of the passengers, while only 30% is used for 92% of the passengers. The most glaring example: on July 13, the MTA raised bus fares and canceled monthly passes for most riders, claiming this action offset a $32-million shortfall. The next week, the board voted an additional $123 million for a Pasadena rail line that in all probability will never be built, using more than $50 million of discretionary funds, which could have covered the alleged deficit.

While public outrage has focused on the fare increases, (and the MTA has vainly attempted to package a 90-cent token and a 25-cent transfer as an “affordable” alternative), the threatened elimination of the $42 pass used by more than 75,000 Angelenos each month would be devastating. For people who take 20 monthly round-trip commutes to work and another 20 for such “luxuries” as child care, health care, visiting family and attending religious services, transit costs would rise to $92 a month--an additional $600 per year for worse service. When an agency with a $2.9-billion budget implements such policies, it is raising racism and class bias to a matter of principle.

On Monday, the next phase of the class-action suit will continue in federal court. Instead of using transit money to fight us, why not accept the temporary restraining order as permanent. Keep the $1.10 bus fare and the $42-a-month pass and work with us to implement a 50-cent fare to significantly increase bus ridership and low-income access. Fund electric and other alternative-fuel low-emission buses and use transit dollars equitably to give all Angelenos a first-class public transportation system.