Curbside Checkers of Busloads Keep Tabs on MTA

It’s one of Los Angeles’ oddest jobs: standing on a street corner counting passengers crammed onto the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s sometimes sardine express--and doing it in seconds without boarding the bus or delaying it.

But that’s what Jim Lopez and his 28 co-workers do.

They perform a little-noticed but critical task of helping to determine whether the transit agency is complying with a federal court order to reduce overcrowding on many of its bus lines.

The schedule checkers, as they are called, estimate passenger loads by looking through bus windows and counting riders--fast.

Sometimes, they must try to count passengers on moving buses; occasionally, they must deal with several buses arriving at the same time.

“Olympic and Vermont,” Lopez said. “I checked that once, and I swore I would never go back again. Ninety-seven buses [in a day].”

The checkers say they have seen 90 or more passengers packed onto 43-seat buses, but that is not necessarily a violation of the court order. It limits standees to an average of 15 during any 20-minute peak period and becomes progressively tougher in the next several years.

“I’ve seen checks that record in excess of 100 passengers on a bus,” said Dana Woodbury, deputy executive officer for operations planning and scheduling for the MTA. “I don’t know whether that’s physically possible. You get a number of younger kids onto a bus, maybe you can get up to 100, particularly if people are sitting in each other’s laps.”

Some checkers use binoculars to get a head start on buses rolling down the street--and occasionally draw suspicious looks from the police who wonder what they’re doing.

“One secret is not to actually count,” Woodbury said. “We’re interested in getting a fairly good estimate of how many people are on each bus. But in many cases, it would be impossible to count in the time that’s available to you. So you develop a sense, through repeated observation, of being able to estimate the number of passengers fairly quickly.”

(Separately, Caltrans has its own corps of counters--workers who stand on freeway overpasses in hard hats and orange vests counting car-poolers for use in assessing whether car-pool lanes promote ride-sharing and reduce traffic congestion.)

“People are always asking me what the hell I’m doing,” David McClure, an organizer with the Bus Riders Union, said while checking passenger loads on 8th Street in downtown Los Angeles. “I’m here as an organizer as well,” he said as he passed out cards urging riders to join the group’s “No Seat? No Fare” campaign.

Representatives of the Bus Riders Union, a plaintiff in the civil rights lawsuit that produced the 1996 consent decree, are trained by MTA schedule checkers to conduct their own passenger surveys. Both sides share the information.

Although the MTA and the riders group have often been at odds over how best to improve bus service, the two sides have agreed on the system used for counting passenger loads.

Even before the civil rights case, checkers for the MTA and the now-defunct Southern California Rapid Transit District rode buses, gathering ridership and schedule information. But their job now is primarily to determine whether the promises made in court have been delivered on the streets.

They haven’t.

The transit authority has acknowledged that most of its lines had at least one instance of overcrowding above the court ordered limit.

“Clearly, things are better than they were before the consent decree,” Woodbury said. “Are they where they need to be? No.”

“No, it hasn’t gotten better,” McClure said. Ted Robertson, a Bus Riders Union organizer, contended that crowding is just as bad, and in some cases, worse.

Although the MTA has moved to replace its aging and unreliable fleet within the next several years, the agency and the plaintiffs are trying to work out a plan on what can be done to more immediately bring the agency into compliance.

Whatever remedy is ordered by “special master” Donald Bliss, appointed by U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter Jr. to monitor the court order, it will grow out of the work of the checkers.

Roving through the county, the checkers sample the 20 busiest lines every other week and 59 other lines at least once every three months.

Dressed in street clothes, they work virtually unnoticed--and they prefer it that way. They don’t want to be distracted or harassed. Checkers say it is easier to count passengers from outside rather than inside the bus. “On the bus, you can get sandwiched into one corner and you can’t see everyone else,” said Robertson, who is among about 30 members of the bus riders group who check passenger loads.

Besides, they’re not supposed to delay the bus. “You are an observer only,” say the MTA rules.

“Each person has their own technique,” said Walt Seiler, senior schedule checker supervisor. “If the bus is moving fast, I’ll count half the load and double it, and then add at least two people because I’m counting the side closest to me and the stairwell is going to take out a seat.”

If the bus is jampacked, “you just count the people standing as best you can,” said Seiler, who like most of the checkers is a former bus driver.

The checkers hate buses covered in advertising because it’s nearly impossible to see into them.

Their most valued equipment: comfortable shoes. They stand all day. On a recent day, Lopez stood on Sunset Boulevard and by his counts, the MTA was doing well--sort of.

His recorded passenger loads on 43-seat buses headed toward downtown: 21, 10, 31, 8, 15, 28, 18, 15, 14, 39, 6.

Across the street, Woody Payne, another veteran checker, found one bus packed with 64 passengers, but there were plenty of seats on most of the 15 buses that passed him during a 90-minute period.

On the other hand, many of the buses arrived ahead of schedule--a problem that contributes to the overcrowding.

A recent sampling of bus lines found that more than half arrived too early or more than five minutes late--for an on-time performance of 46% in August, down from 50% the previous month.

If one bus runs ahead of schedule, the bus behind must take on larger loads and then runs late, setting off a process called “bunching.” The court order does not guarantee that buses will arrive on time.

MTA officials say they are trying to improve on-time performance, including assigning more supervisors to the streets.