Improved Bus Service Should Top the List : L.A.’s transit-dependent workers deserve a better deal

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board is expected today to take up the issue of the 13.7-mile, 13-station, conventional light rail system that will run from Union Station to eastern Pasadena.

The issue will not be whether to build it, but how. Back in March, MTA cost estimates indicated that the line would cost $997.7 million, leading Booz-Allen & Hamilton Inc., a management consulting firm, to conclude that it would be far less costly to take a so-called “turnkey” contracting approach. That would, among other things, allocate some risks typically borne by the MTA to the contractor.

The cost of that option was placed at about $750 million. Since then, however, MTA’s own staff claims that it has come up with cost reductions that would drop the final bill for the Pasadena Blue Line to $803.9 million, without anticipated delays.

It is difficult to argue with an idea that could still result in savings of tens of millions of transportation dollars, even if it results in some delay in completing the line. The turnkey approach still deserves strong consideration.

With the resumption of work on the Red Line extension toward the San Fernando Valley, and this week’s focus on the line to Pasadena, it would be easy to conclude that the MTA’s primary goal now is to move smartly ahead with light and heavy rail construction.

But the MTA must project a broader goal. Improved bus service is a matter of great importance for the hundreds of thousands of transit-dependent workers in greater Los Angeles. It ought to be a priority, and deserves much more attention now and in the future.

MTA board member Zev Yaroslavsky, for example, points out that the MTA must spend its available cash and sell more bonds to complete the Pasadena line. Yaroslavsky’s concern is that this will push the MTA perilously close to its bonding limit. If that’s true, what will be left over to apply to bus transportation?

The question will become more significant as the date for court action on the Bus Riders Union and the Labor/Community Strategy Center’s lawsuit against the MTA approaches. Currently, the matter is scheduled to be taken up in federal court in Los Angeles in mid-May.

Among other things, the lawsuit contends that the MTA has done irreversible harm to some 350,000 predominantly poor and minority bus riders by trying to raise fares and eliminate monthly bus passes. The lawsuit further seeks to permanently enjoin the MTA from operating an allegedly discriminatory, two-tier, separate and unequal system of public transportation that favors rail service for the affluent over the needs of the bus-dependent poor.

We’re not here to comment on the strength of the lawsuit, nor to consider its chances for success. It is important to note, however, that the suit looms large on the MTA funding horizon, and it requires action.

Recall that the MTA’s expansive 1992 plan took great pains to note that there had been virtually no increase in the bus fleet in 10 years. And what happened when the MTA was forced to drastically scale back that plan? The 20-year plan unveiled last year reduced the overall cost by 64%, the rail segments by 68% and the expansion of the bus fleet by 79%.

The MTA says that the bus service is now cleaner and more efficient that it was five years ago. Perhaps so. But Los Angeles still has the nation’s most crowded bus system. The MTA lacks a permanent chief executive officer, and the 20-year plan still on the books was declared unrealistic and dead on arrival by Mayor Richard Riordan.

Riordan is on record as saying that he wants a better overall plan and that it has to be based on better bus service. He has said the board should make quality bus service “its highest priority.”

Interim MTA CEO Joseph Drew, who has been lobbying to keep the job, echoes the same sentiments. “Improving the bus service. That is the top priority,” he says.

If that is so, then residents deserve to know far more about the Bus Service Improvement Plan now being touted by the MTA. Whether it goes far enough in meeting the needs of the region’s bus-dependent riders remains to be seen.

Expertise in that area ought to be high on the list of selection criteria for the next permanent CEO, and the issue of bus service ought to be an agenda item of equal importance to rail at the MTA board meetings to come.