MTA Challenges Bus Order

* Your April 18 article says, “The MTA argues that the special master’s action is so extreme that it wrests control of the transit agency from its board and management. ‘At its extreme you could have the federal court system over a long period of time telling us what to do,’ said MTA Chief Executive Julian Burke.”

This is, indeed, the message that the Feds have been sending for some time now, and it is consistent with the MTA’s blind arrogance that officials are only just now noticing it. The “big bite” that they fear will be taken out of other projects, particularly rail, is really just a bite back from the bus riders, who have had the teeth of the MTA in their behinds for more than five years now. The bus riders (still over 90% of those who use public transportation) have suffered long enough at the hands of “civic leaders” who continually look past them toward a hallucinatory vision of a gleaming future that does not exist.

Rail projects can never replace bus service; buses go to places that rails cannot, places where most of us working-class folks live or need to get to in order to make a living. If it takes longer to finish the rail projects as a result of upgrading the long-degraded bus system, so be it. And while the thought of federal courts controlling the transportation system in L.A. is indeed frightening, it could only be an improvement over the current management bloc.

BRIAN PARSHALL

Los Angeles

* Claiming that more than nine people standing on a 40-foot bus, which is designed to accommodate 20 standees, is a violation of civil rights is an absurd standard that no transit agency in America could ever meet. Bravo to the MTA for standing up to Special Master Donald Bliss. They need to review the entire misframed, draconian consent decree.

Wasting a billion dollars solely on buses will not save one minute of travel time, make maxed-out bus lines less crowded, pull any cars off the road or upgrade a neighborhood. Public transportation will remain a sort of failed social welfare program used only by the poor until they buy their first car and then never return to the system. The bus-only strategy creates its own congested and racist caste system.

ROGER CHRISTENSEN

Sherman Oaks