MTA Should Get Back on Bus

Once the Metropolitan Transportation Authority failed to meet the terms of a court consent decree demanding that it improve bus service to poor riders, it relinquished certain powers. Among them is the agency’s ability to dictate plans on its own terms. Now, the MTA is chafing at the rough edges of a demanding order for expansive new bus purchases.

The MTA will just have to get used to it. Better yet, the MTA ought to drop its legal wrangling over the consent decree, save the legal expense and do its best to comply with the court order, period.

Instead, the MTA complains that the special master in the case, Donald Bliss, has gone beyond his authority. The agency’s arguments are loaded with unintentional irony. Does emphasizing buses threaten to delay other transit projects? Well, yes. That was the whole point of the legal action, which charged that too much had been spent on rail and not enough on buses. Does an order to buy many more buses threaten to wrest control of the transit agency from its board and management? Of course it does. That is how such cases work, nationwide. A lawsuit filed on behalf of an aggrieved party, say foster children is settled, but the agency fails to make the improvements it agreed on to reach that settlement. The court orders the improvements and by so doing assumes a measure of control over the agency.

The MTA agreed to settle the lawsuit by bus riders. The MTA agreed on and then failed to make specific improvements. It agreed on the choice of Bliss as the special master in the case. And if the MTA decides to appeal Bliss’ decision, it will go before federal Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr., the jurist who originally restrained the MTA from hiking bus fares five years ago. That would be a clear waste of taxpayers’ money and an effort better spent on improving bus service.