MTA Can Boost Ridership and Stay Viable : Transit: Put the high-priced rail projects on hold and add more buses with lower fares.

The MTA will attempt to vote today on its latest 20-year plan, as its funding is running out and its rail projects are run into the ground because of the expansion of three additional major rail projects, combined with cuts in bus service and the possibility of further bus-fare increases.

The Labor/Community Strategy Center’s Bus Riders Union is proposing an alternative 20-year plan that incorporates existing rail projects but proposes a major expansion of bus service.

The proposal would include a 10% increase in bus service and bus purchases, beginning July 1, for 10 years. This would double bus service in less than eight years and increase bus purchases to 250 each year.

Lower bus fares would attract more transit-dependent, low-income riders, more than 80% of whom are Latino, African American and Asian Pacific Islander. The MTA should lower the bus fare to 90 cents a ride (from the current $1.35) and the monthly pass to $34 (from $49) for 3 years. In year four, this should be lowered to 85 cents and $32 per month; in year five to 80 cents and $30 per month.

Fare-box revenues are a very small percentage of the MTA’s $3-billion budget, and the public is already paying a 1-cent-per-dollar sales tax on top of the fares.

These changes would lead to a dramatic increase in bus ridership--adding 100 million rides per year in just five years. In the past five years, MTA ridership has dropped more than 20% because of higher fares and worse service. This plan would not reduce overcrowding for the first three years because of the increased ridership, but people would reach work and family faster and more dependably.

The MTA should initiate a pilot project to purchase 10% of its new buses as electric battery, “zero emission” vehicles--25 buses per year for 3 years. Electric, and later hydrogen fuel-cell, buses would help the environment and support local manufacturers such as Specialty Vehicles in Downey who could hire local residents.

The MTA should impose a moratorium on all planned rail projects--specifically the Pasadena Line, the East-West Line and the third leg of the Red Line (as well as save $400 additional million by cutting all planning funds for rail lines they can’t afford) since cost overruns on these projects have already jeopardized the future viability of the existing bus system.

This alternative proposal--accompanied by thousands of signatures from bus riders--has been brought to the attention of City Councilman Richard Alatorre, Mayor Riordan and every MTA board member. We are asking MTA officials to scrap their plan and adopt ours--placing the needs of 350,000 daily bus riders at the center of transit policy--and to consider a grass-roots driven proposal that will reduce expenditures and dramatically increase ridership--a revolutionary idea in our climate of the profitization of government.