Hub-and-Spoke Routing Won’t Help Bus System

This is to voice my strong disagreement with your Dec. 4 editorial that supported the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s efforts to redesign the San Fernando Valley bus line routing to fit a hub-and-spoke motif.

To begin with, the Valley is laid out in an almost-perfect grid. Were the bus lines routed correctly and the scheduling done properly, none of the problems you noted would exist.

Hub-and-spoke would not be an improvement over the present system. A number of lines will be taken out of service, displacing many riders and causing them to leave earlier for work and arrive home much later. Riders will be forced to use transit centers--usually at dismal and desolate places without stores, restrooms or other urban amenities. Several lines will run even less frequently, so that, except in rush hours, people will still have to wait long whiles for buses. All or parts of some major streets will lose bus services altogether--this will be particularly true in low-income and minority areas, which have the bulk of the bus-riding public.

The significance of Warner Center is appreciated, but will it generate the amount of bus riders to justify the hub-and-spoke plans for it? How many bus lines will feed into the center and at the expense of how many other lines?

If one is a bus rider , it would be very difficult to support the hub-and-spoke concept for the Valley. I see the Valley for what it is and what it needs in the way of public transportation for I am an all-purpose user of the system. I see the schools, the industrial areas, the parks, the shopping centers that are underserved--or not served at all, such as the equestrian center.

CHARLES J. THOMAS

North Hollywood