Getting There the Hard Way, Every Day : Transit: For L.A.’s car-less poor, dependence on buses means a life of grinding inconvenience.

In this, the land of 5 million cars, Danya Gomez makes do without one.

To follow Gomez on her daily rounds aboard the city’s buses is a lesson in fortitude, requiring the strength of a stevedore, for hoisting bundles and babies, and the patience of a saint, for the long waits and repeated transfers.

Hers is the transportation system, separate and unequal, that serves the foot soldiers in Los Angeles’ work force, the men and women who clean the houses, tend the gardens, serve the meals and wash the cars of the well-to-do, earning minimum wage and enduring maximum aggravation.

Deprived of easy mobility, the first freedom in Southern California, the car-less poor spend an inordinate amount of time and a disproportionate share of their incomes getting from one place to another because of reduced service and rising fares.

They are captive to inferior jobs and overpriced food in neighborhoods where most of the employers and merchants have long since fled. They do without small pleasures such as a morning in church or an afternoon at the beach. And they live lives of grinding inconvenience because simple errands become ordeals and two-mile trips turn into two-hour pilgrimages.

Each Saturday, Gomez, who lives in one of Los Angeles County’s 290,200 car-less households, readies her children for the punishing trip to the supermarket, an uphill hike along Alvarado Street from their Pico-Union home and a ride on the No. 16 bus to 3rd and Vermont.

The shopping is the easy part, with 3-year-old Nathaly and 1-year-old Dominic giggling in the cart as Gomez buries them under tortillas, tomatoes, sacks of sugar and loaves of bread.

The lugging is another story.

Sometimes Gomez leaves behind a needed gallon of milk so she can carry a 6-pound, 7-ounce carton of Surf detergent, but still the load staggers the slender 22-year-old, who is studying to be a medical assistant.

Four plastic grocery bags hang from one arm, the handles leaving deep welts in Gomez’s wrists. Three more bags hang from the other arm, plus the box of detergent. Dominic balances in the crook of his mother’s arm; Nathaly scurries at her feet, carrying the lightest bag.

Every few feet the family rests.

Gomez falls to her knees, winded and red-faced. She slides her raw arms from the bags and shakes them for circulation. She offers the baby a bottle that is tucked in her purse. Then Nathaly helps her mother reload, stringing one bag at a time on her outstretched arms.

This routine is repeated as the family boards the bus, disembarks and makes its way several blocks home. Gomez kneels, catches her breath. Nathaly, with the air of a child playing dress-up, helps her realign the bundles. Dominic gurgles and dozes. Gomez sweats.

Still, she is uncomplaining. In her immigrant neighborhood, Gomez is not alone in her exhausted reliance on the nation’s largest and most crowded bus system, which earlier this year raised fares from $1.10 to $1.35.

The rising bus fares and a proposal to eliminate monthly passes are the impetus for a class-action lawsuit expected to come to trial this fall in federal District Court in Los Angeles. It alleges that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, by raising prices on dilapidated buses while investing billions in a state-of-the-art commuter rail system, intentionally discriminates against minority and poor riders.

The MTA defends the fare increases, the first in six years, as an unfortunate necessity in an era of shrinking local revenues and federal subsidies.

“Definitely, we understand the pain it causes somebody who relies on our system,” said Andrea Greene, the MTA’s spokesperson. “But what are we to do?”

Martin Wachs, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies there, is one of a dozen experts at local universities lined up against the MTA in its bid to raise fares. Wachs and others note that fare hikes and changes in the monthly bus pass could erase the small margin between a minimum wage job and a welfare grant, encouraging people to choose a handout over a salary.

“In modern society, it’s clear mobility is as critical a need as housing, health care, education and so on,” Wachs said. “It is a public service of extreme importance, a key to access to other opportunities. And we have not recognized in making public policy how important it is to low-income people.”

Nowhere is this segregated city more segregated than on the MTA’s fleet of 1,700 coaches, which carry 350,000 passengers a day across 1,433 square miles, from the manicured, fortified mansions of the Westside to the swap meets, body shops and mortuaries to the east. White faces are a distinct minority on these buses, where MTA research has found that passengers are 47% Latino and 23% black.

Poverty binds the riders; more than 6 in 10 live in households that earn less than $15,000 and it shows in their exhausted eyes. Most are women. They drag strollers behind them, brace packages between their ankles as the bus lurches forward and stand stooped under the dead weight of children sleeping in their arms.

Among these bus riders, more than half have no access to cars or vans, putting them in a rare category at a time when those without vehicles are a steadily declining percentage of the population--around 11% of households locally and nationally.

Perhaps because they are so marginalized, the car-less poor get little sympathy from their employers.

Rosa Ayala, who earns $9,000 a year cleaning a Beverly Hills office building, is docked pay for tardiness, suspended if it happens three times and not allowed to leave five minutes before her 2:30 a.m. quitting time to catch a bus that comes only every half hour in the middle of the night. Her husband, who makes $5,000 a year washing cars in Santa Monica, is sent home without pay if he is late.

“It’s not important to them why,” Ayala said, through an interpreter. “They don’t understand we come on a bus. Or they say buy a car. How can we buy a car on what we earn?”

In this world, status is measured in meager ways: A monthly bus pass, tucked in a scarred leather wallet, separates the haves, relatively speaking, from the have-nots. Those with the passes jump on and off the buses at will, for a flat monthly cost. Those without them pay $1.35 for each trip and an additional 25 cents for each transfer.

Many cannot afford the passes, especially now that the settlement in the MTA lawsuit has temporarily raised the price by $7, to $49 a month. But left to its own devices, the transportation authority would have eliminated the passes, doubling, tripling or quadrupling the cost of transport for many bus riders.

The attempt to eliminate the passes is what most angers Constance L. Rice, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who will try the case before U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr.

“It is callousness of the first order,” Rice said. “That pass is the only thing that lets working people get to jobs in a reasonable way.”

As with many expenditures that are economical in the long run--say, a refrigerator or a washing machine--the poor pay dearly when they cannot afford the pass at the beginning of the month.

Typical is Reyna Campos, a housekeeper, who works a split shift, six days a week, at Clinica Para Las Americas in Pico Union: from 7 a.m. to 11 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. During her break, Campos sometimes travels several miles to an elementary school where she serves as a volunteer health educator, teaching other Latinas about birth control. And often she rides the bus to pay bills or shop.

What that means is a bare minimum of four daily bus trips, to and from work, each of them costing $1.60 with a transfer. Some days, Campos makes as many as four additional trips, bringing her daily transportation costs to $6.40.

Over the course of a month, Campos can easily spend $153.60--more than three times the cost of the pass that she often cannot muster the lump sum for because she has sent money to her children in El Salvador, helped out a friend fallen on hard times, or paid an unexpectedly large telephone bill.

Ayala, the janitor, regularly bought monthly bus passes until she was robbed twice in quick succession on her 4:30 a.m. walk home from the bus stop. Hers is a particularly feral neighborhood, the cement barricades and high wrought-iron fences mute testimony that gangs rule these streets. During the first robbery, Ayala struggled. The second time, she gave up her canvas satchel without a fight.

Inside were her uniform, wallet and checkbook--and her bus pass. “Ever since I have it in my mind if I buy a pass they’ll steal it,” she said.

In addition to money, the poor lose time, mind-numbing hours of it, riding the buses.

Charles Lave, a professor of economics at the University of California at Irvine who has studied so-called zero-vehicle households for the federal government, says that the average trip takes three times longer without a car.

Bus riders do not need a calculator to know they are squandering hours that could be better spent. Miss a bus by a second and it can cost you an hour. Watch a driver slam the door in your face because the bus is full and know the afternoon is shot. Arrive at the corner of Slauson as the Sante Fe freight line comes by and you’re hopelessly late to your next appointment.

Because a missed connection means a ruined day, Eva Cortes, a mental health counselor at Clinica Para Las Americas, runs for buses even when weighted down with packages and toddlers. As a result, her son, Timothy, had the drill down even as a babe in arms.

“Ahi viene el bus! Corramos!” Cortes would announce to the sleeping child.

Now Timothy is walking and talking and he mimics her command: “Here comes the bus, Mama. Get ready to run!”

Held captive by their limited mobility, the car-less poor have a particular struggle buying food and finding jobs. They make long bus trips to find milk at $3.05 a gallon instead of $2.19. They make even longer journeys to clean houses in distant venues like Topanga Canyon, where the work is easier and the pay higher than in the office buildings or garment factories Downtown.

And they wear the strain in their faces.

Danya Gomez, for one, finishes school next month and is looking for a job as a medical assistant. The best positions, she says, are in hospitals, where she would be required to work night shifts. So she will settle for something less.

“Coming home at night is so dangerous,” she said. “Too many cholos, gang people.”

Cradled in her lap are her children, worn out from the regular Saturday trip to the supermarket. But shopping and even job-hunting are not the hardest part of doing without a car, Gomez says.

“When my little girl says take me to Disneyland and I can’t get there, that is the hard part,” she said. “And when I think what will happen if I have to take them to the hospital. Right now I’m trying not to let them get sick.”