Gearing Up to Improve Valley’s Bus System

To their credit, San Fernando Valley lawmakers last week finally said publicly what most reasonable observers have known for the past two years: A rail line connecting North Hollywood to Warner Center is dead for the foreseeable future. Aside from clearly and forcefully stating the obvious, the consensus that Valley rail will stop in North Hollywood allows public officials and community leaders to rally behind transit plans that actually have a chance of becoming real.

For instance, the eight local, county, state and federal officials who attended last week’s transit summit in Universal City largely agreed that the Valley’s bus system deserves all the attention it can get. Their view is all the more important as it came just days before MTA chief Julian Burke suggested stopping all rail construction after North Hollywood. Borrowing ideas from around the world, participants suggested a variety of ways to make the Valley’s rubber-tired transit network more efficient and responsive to the needs of riders.

Improvements such as dedicated busways, nicer buses and more flexible routes would go a long way toward luring commuters out of their cars and making the ride more comfortable for existing passengers. Uniting behind those kinds of practical improvements would be a break from the pork-barrel parochialism that--along with bungling by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--helped doom rail projects across Los Angeles County.

But unity is necessary. Without it, the Valley will lose out to regions where elected and community leaders see the long-term wisdom of transit and cooperate to find common ground. Even with a unified front, though, there are no guarantees that the MTA will have enough money to make significant improvements in the Valley’s bus system--estimated to cost as much as $1.1 billion over two decades.

That’s why simple, incremental improvements are best. Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Northridge) suggested using transportation money to build more freeways instead of transit systems that operate either at the margins or with subsidies. To make his point, he asked the 100 or so members of the audience to indicate how many rode mass transit to the summit. Just three had. It was a dramatic point, but the wrong one.

Odds are, the bus riders who depend on reliable, efficient mass transit were at work, unable to take time off to attend a conference of politicians, business leaders, community activists and other power brokers. The simple fact is that thousands of people every day depend on buses to get to work, to take kids to the doctor, to buy groceries. They do it not because they want to do their part for the environment or to escape freeway gridlock. They do it because they have no other choice.

The first priority for Valley transit is to improve the lives of existing passengers by providing more frequent buses on the most crowded routes and by building a route structure that gives riders more flexibility. Improving the existing system is the first step toward building a new constituency of riders--commuters who now fear buses as unsafe and unreliable. The time to start is now. Some studies estimate speeds on freeways will slow to a crawl within the next 20 years. Rail lines will alleviate some of the pressure, but buses remain cheaper and more flexible.

The road ahead is clear. Now it’s time to follow it.