Buses Fuel a Way of Life for O.C. Poor : Transit: Some fear for their jobs if OCTA funds go for fiscal recovery.

By JODI WILGOREN

Aug. 13, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Everyone notices the grumbling, soot-belching bus that lumbers in and out of the right-hand lane, but no one sees the faces behind the tinted windows.

They are dark faces, mostly. Many are dirty from work or wear. They are tired faces, tired from waking up hours before having to be somewhere, getting home hours after they are done for the day.

Aboard the 367 Orange County Transportation Authority buses that crisscross the county each day sits a society of sacrifice. People without cars. People without family. A woman without shoes.

Many riders have no jobs. Many more have jobs they can’t keep if the buses don’t run.

They are a hardy breed, some walking miles to wait ages for buses that land them only close to where they want to be. They are resourceful nomads, toting everything they need in worn purses, bursting backpacks or plastic grocery sacks stuffed between their feet. Yet they yearn for interdependence, meddling uninvited in one another’s conversations in hopes of building a mobile community.

They are worried now, with Orange County and state officials trying to raid sales tax revenue from the $135-million-a-year bus system to help with the county’s bankruptcy recovery effort. The OCTA warns that the raid would destroy the last resort for the county’s neediest, though the county’s bankruptcy consultants believe money can be shifted around to minimize the impact on buses.

For most residents, the bus system is as invisible as their own veins. For the riders--a scant 2% of the county’s 2.5 million population--it is a lifeblood.

It is the conveyor belt shuttling service workers into high-priced hotels and gated communities, the crutch on which the elderly hobble to the doctor, the shopping cart for immigrants lugging satchels of cans and cartons home for family dinner.

It can also be a commuter kaffeeklatsch, a college admission ticket, a tour guide for out-of-town guests. It is summer camp for a band of bored teen-agers, a field trip for a group of mentally disabled adults, an afternoon adventure for the hopeless homeless.

It is the ultimate equalizer, where anyone who can pay $1 can grab a seat and ride, ride, ride.

Tammy Dye’s $37.50 monthly bus pass was her ticket to freedom.

Now 24, with sons ages 5 and 3 and parents long dead, Dye says she would not have left the boyfriend who beat her had there been no buses whizzing by her home in San Clemente.

OCTA’s buses took her on the three-hour trek to Santa Ana to get a restraining order against the man who fathered her children. They carried her to the welfare office in Laguna Hills. And for three years now, they have been bringing her to Saddleback College, where she is trying desperately to change her future.

“If it weren’t for the bus, I wouldn’t be able to go to school,” Dye said in a twang stemming from her North Carolina roots. “If it weren’t for school, I’d never get off the bus.”

Wednesday evening, Dye and the two blonds were headed north on Route 91A, 5-year-old Storm napping, 3-year-old Brent climbing on the seats and poles and steps. They stopped at Mission Viejo Mall to buy the boys outfits, then hitched a ride to church in Irvine with a friend who works at the mall.

She has to be extra-organized; being one minute late can ruin a day’s plan when buses come an hour apart.

“Last week, we were running to catch the bus. Sometimes, you just wave your arms and wave your arms, and they don’t stop, because they don’t care or they don’t see you,” she said. “I’ve cried because I missed the bus.

“Trying to juggle two backpacks, two lunches, a kid, a blanket, teddy bear and a stroller on a full bus is amazing,” she said, sighing. “You can’t potty-train a kid on the bus. You just sit there and pray, ‘Don’t potty.’ ”

With help from Laura’s House, a battered-women’s shelter in San Clemente, Dye is buying a car. , Monday, she gets off the bus for good.

“I thank God for [the bus],” she said, clutching her coverless paperback Bible as the bus reached her stop. “But I never want to do it again.”

Destination: Disneyland.

Diana, Marina and Jaylen Narinesingh--13, 16 and 18 years old--are visiting Orange County for the summer from the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago. While Mom and Dad do chemistry research, the three siblings hop on the bus outside their Tustin motel each morning and explore the county.

They’ve been to all the malls and shopping centers, but haven’t bothered with the beach because they have plenty of that back home. Wednesday, they arrived at the Happiest Place on Earth at 9:30 a.m., alone on the bus save for a couple of waiters.

“We don’t know what to expect. We just see a place and go,” Marina said. “Wherever the bus takes us, we go.”

It all begins before daybreak.

The bus yard just south of the Garden Grove Freeway at Harbor Boulevard is like a cemetery at this time of day, with hundreds of hulking, darkened buses parked in angled rows like so many headstones. Then, in a kind of Halloween horror movie ritual, they come alive one by one: flashing lights, tooting horns, backing out of their designated spots and rolling away from the pack.

Like their passengers, the OCTA’s 760 drivers must be on time for their shifts; one minute late and they lose their scheduled run to a driver who is “riding the boards”--filling in for people who don’t show up.

Deborah King doesn’t officially start until 4:50 a.m., but she gets there at 4 so there’s time for coffee--no food or drink is allowed on the buses--before her 5:05 a.m. departure.

She gives her $235,000 vehicle a check. She puts the emergency break on and tries to back up, unfurls the electric wheelchair ramp. She stops at the driver’s lounge--where a driver is watching an old Jane Fonda movie until she gets her daily assignment--and then King is off, cruising through the darkness in the left lane now, unhindered by the need to stop.

Because of seniority, King gets a top pick when the drivers bid for routes three times a year and has landed the 89, which is seven daily trips between the Laguna Hills Mall and Fashion Island, a half-hour each way with bathrooms at both ends. Perfect attendance for a year lets her also select her vehicle: It’s got to be fast, quiet and, most important, have a comfy seat. “You sit in that seat for a lot of hours,” she said.

Now 51, King started driving at age 13, taking her mom’s 1951 Buick to the store for bread and milk. Left alone with three children and no child support, she joined OCTA as a driver in 1980.

“Everybody knows that men get more pay than women, so I decided to get a man’s job so I could get a man’s pay to support a man’s family,” King explained. “I love to drive, and I love people, and they pay me to do this.

“It’s like you’re in business for yourself; that’s how I look at it,” she added. “Once I leave the yard, that’s my bus. I treat it like my house.”

Six people are waiting for King’s bus at 5:45 a.m. when she pulls into the Laguna Hills Transportation Center, near the mall and Leisure World.

King and her riders spend only a few minutes together each day, but they have formed a kind of family.

Dan McGee already has on the white apron and checkered neckerchief for his job as a chef at Pavilions--he rides the bus because his car’s transmission broke and he was too broke to fix it. Darlene Hamilton, a mousy woman whose slip shows beneath her skirt, has a car but fears freeways, so she rides each day to work at an accounting firm. Mauro, a kitchen worker at Las Brisas in Laguna Beach, is 46 but never learned how to drive.

Then there is Jimmy, who stays on King’s 89 for, literally, less than a minute, just shuttling around the corner inside the transportation center to wait for another bus.

“He just likes to talk to us,” McGee explains, “so he gets on our bus first.”

McGee talks about his bus escapades as though he is at a high school reunion:

There was the time the girls from drama class led everyone in a round of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” The group that got coffee and doughnuts each Thursday, until they got busted by an OCTA executive riding incognito. The recipe exchange among riders on the No. 1. The driver who opened his door each day to say “Good morning” to a Chihuahua scared of the bus. Another driver who gave Christmas cookies to the regulars.

“Every bus I’ve ridden has its own personality,” he said. “There are a lot of really interesting things you talk about. No matter what you want to find out about, you find out on the bus.”

This morning, a sheriff’s deputy has driven his car into a tree, forcing King to take a detour. She is 10 minutes late arriving at Calle Corte, and Dennis Reed teases her as he climbs aboard at 6:05 a.m., saying, “Buenas noches.”

Vince Croome and Nancy Taylor get on next, and sit together, though the bus is half-empty. They’re bus buddies. Croome has made lots of new friends this way: He recently went to brunch with a driver and some other passengers. Once, when he got other rides to work for three days in a row, a driver called him at home to see if Croome was sick.

Croome says he called Gov. Pete Wilson’s office 12 times earlier this month urging him to veto the bill that would have shifted bus funds. He’s ready to do it again when a similar bill is introduced in the next legislative session.

“If they cut out the [buses], I’m in the unemployment line,” he said. “ If I can get there.”

Eleven passengers were on the 43 bus at 10:05 a.m. when it pulled into the Disneyland Hotel stop. Six were asleep.

There was a guy in the back left corner, head against the rear wall, arms folded across his chest. A teen-ager was at the other end of the back bench seat, his shaven, tattooed head hanging forward in dreamland. Toward the front, a twentysomething woman wearing headphones and sunglasses leaned comfortably against the side window.

In the seat by the door, Dan Doolittle and his guide dog, Viking, were both snoozing. A man with a white beard dressed all in black, his pants pushed up to his knees, was head-bobbing a few seats away, practically in unison with a man a generation younger, whose glasses were just as thick.

The constant rumbling of the engine and the rhythmic swoosh of doors opening are bedtime lullabies to the seasoned riders. They would wake from the silence if the bus shut off.

Everyone waited while Autumn Uszinski dropped pennies into the fare box. Sixty of them, plus one quarter, one dime, one nickel. Finally finished, the 15-year-old tromped to the back of the 29 bus to join five friends for the two-hour, 28-mile trek from the dead air of La Habra to the breeze of Huntington Beach.

No one in the group can drive. Besides, they meet weird people on the bus, have fun bugging the drivers. And the air conditioning feels fine.

Autumn takes off her work shirt to reveal a bikini top, then puts it back on. She sits down, stands up, tromps around some more, sits down again. The gang make the trip a couple of times a week, after summer school. Once, they got kicked off the bus for being too loud.

Today, they play Truth-or-Dare.

“I dare you to kiss Jeremiah [Berman, 15],” Anthony Ramirez, 16, says to Autumn. “You don’t have to dare her to do that!” blurts Greg Jurek, 16, as Autumn and Jeremiah’s lips meet for a second.

Someone dares Autumn to kiss a pole in the bus. She does. Then Angie dares Autumn to make out with a stranger, a raggedy guy in a bright yellow T-shirt with “Danny” tattooed on his arm who just happened to sit on the outskirts of the game. Autumn gets up, gets ready.

Without missing a beat, the man says, “No, I’m not playing.”

OCTA buses are uncommonly clean. There is no urine smell on the buses, or at the stops, or even in the central terminal in Santa Ana. There are no graffiti. It is rarely standing-room-only on the buses, and the transit centers have none of the hustle, none of the noise normally associated with public transportation.

These things are good, said Gene Gomez, a 33-year-old transplant from the Bronx. The waiting, Gomez said, is not good.

Gomez lives in Orange. To get to Anaheim for an 11 a.m. meeting, he took the 53 to Santa Ana and is waiting for the 60, to the 43, to the 42. Later he’ll head to Laguna Beach to shoot hoops: Three more buses. Three more to get home.

He left his house at 7 a.m., listening to jazz on the headphones, gym shorts in his backpack, and will get home about 9 p.m. Spends 12 to 16 hours a week on the bus.

“If I want to get the most out of my day,” he said, “I have to stay near where I live.”

The bus is full, but the people are quiet. It is 7 p.m. and still hot outside, but it’s cool on the bus careening up the freeway from Laguna Hills to Santa Ana. Another long day of riding and working and riding is almost over.

Rafael Luna, 50, is carrying two empty water bottles home for a refill for the next day. Joaquin Valderrama, 29, has an empty lunch sack. Other men swing empty coolers.

“The bus is more secure. Every part of a car is going to cost more,” Valderrama said in Spanish.

“Fewer problems,” Luna agreed. “It costs less. A car is a lot of money--license, gas, it’s a lot of money. Better on the bus.”

Luna and Valderrama are from different worlds. The older man, of European descent, is from Taxco, Mexico City. Valderrama’s ruddy skin shows his Indian bloodline; he is from Zacatecas, in the central part of the country. But their problems are the same: Luna has four children ages 6 to 14; Valderrama has six, from 2 to 14.

Six days a week, they sit side-by-side on the bus, then work side-by-side at the Laguna Niguel Car Wash for $4.25 an hour. That’s $204 a week, plus a few bucks in tips.

“There is no work in Santa Ana,” Valderrama said. “There is work, but there are so many people that want work.”

What would happen to you if there were no bus? the men were asked.

“We couldn’t work,” Luna replied.

And if you don’t work?

“We don’t eat,” they said in unison.

A 40-foot bus can’t stop for a quick-changing yellow light, and so, too, the system shuts down slowly.

The last bus, route 43, makes its final stop on Balboa Peninsula at 11:53 p.m., less than five hours before the buses begin pulling out again. But most drivers call it quits much earlier; about half the routes stop around 5 p.m., only a handful run past 8.

At the central terminal in Santa Ana, the information booth shuts down at 5, so if the schedule boxes are empty, they stay empty. There aren’t many people there by 7:30 p.m., anyway. At the Garden Grove yard, the buses careen around the corner of the private driveway, the operators anxious to return the behemoths to their beds.

While the sun sets over the city, the route 60 bus lumbers west on 1st Street. As restaurant signs outside change from Mexican to Vietnamese, so do the passengers.

A middle-aged couple smooch in their seats. A man with a trim white beard pages through a Spanish tabloid. A guy in boots and a blue hard hat twists a plastic bag in grimy hands, eager to finally get off the bus.

Tomorrow, the lifeblood will pump again.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

OCTA Odyssey

The one sure way to learn about Orange County’s buses is to ride them. Times staff writer Jodi Wilgoren spent more than 14 hours one day riding the Orange County Transportation Authority’s routes. Here’s where she went:

Departure time: 5:45 a.m.

Route: 89

Departure/Destination: Laguna Hills Transportation Center to Newport Transportation Center

****

Departure time: 6:47

Route: 57

Departure/Destination: Newport Transportation Center to Santa Ana central terminal

****

Departure time: 9:02

Route: 51

Departure/Destination: Santa Ana terminal to Disneyland Hotel

****

Departure time: 10:05

Route: 43

Departure/Destination: Disneyland Hotel to Fullerton Transportation Center

****

Departure time: 10:55

Route: 41

Departure/Destination: Fullerton Center to Brea Mall

****

Departure time: 12:55 p.m.

Route: 29

Departure/Destination: Brea Mall to Huntington Beach Pier

****

Departure time: 3:40

Route: 1

Departure/Destination: Huntington Beach Pier to Kmart Plaza, San Clemente

****

Departure time: 5:32

Route: 91A

Departure/Destination: Kmart Plaza to Laguna Hills Mall

****

Departure time: 6:57

Route: 85

Departure/Destination: Laguna Hills Mall to Santa Ana terminal

****

Departure time: 7:59

Route: 64

Departure/Destination: Santa Ana terminal to Harbor Boulevard and 1st Street

****

Departure time: 8:15

Route: 43

Departure/Destination: Harbor and 1st to Harbor and Cardinal Circle

****

Declining Trends

OCTA buses currently average about 50,000 riders per day. Annual ridership, based on individual boardings on every bus and number of vehicles in service during peak evening hours, peaked in the early ‘90s. Here are the trends by fiscal year, riders in millions:

Riders

1989: 38.8

1995: 41.6

Note: One rider may make multiple boardings per day

Peak-Hour Buses

1989: 366

1995: 390

Buses by the Numbers

* OCTA annual budget, including capital expenditures: $135 million

* Percent of budget from rider fares: 21

* Number of bus drivers: 760

* Number of mechanics: 231