A Dismaying Month on Public Transit

Fingering the cardboard transit pass in his pocket, Dana Reed grinned gamely and plunged into the crowded Los Angeles subway car.

“If this isn’t the right one, we’re in trouble,” he said as he claimed a spot in the aisle and grabbed for a handrail as the car lurched forward. “We’ll end up in the wrong place.”

Reed is a Newport Beach lawyer who serves as vice chairman of the state Transportation Commission. Wednesday evening, he was in a downtown Los Angeles subway station, trying to get to Hollywood so he could catch a bus to Westwood.

It was Day 27 of a monthlong personal experiment to see whether the millions of state and federal dollars his commission has pumped into Southern California public transportation is paying off.

Reed had parked and locked his car for the month of July, relying exclusively on buses and trains to get around. He kept a daily journal on the Internet detailing his experiences--and frustrations.

Like Day 3, the first time Reed tried to take the Metro Rail subway to Hollywood. He ended up in the Wilshire District, miles from his destination.

“For some totally inexplicable reason, the MTA has TWO Metro Red Lines and for the novice rider it is almost impossible to figure out which is which. You have a 50-50 chance of getting on the wrong train,” his journal fumed.

Such observations fill Reed’s journal (https://www.dgs.ca.gov/ctc/travels).

Reed, 55, described himself on Day 5 as “embarrassed and frustrated” by Orange County mass transit after it took him five hours to travel from his house to the Los Angeles apartment where he stays weeknights.

“To say that I’m angry is a gross understatement,” he wrote as he sat at the Santa Ana Amtrak station after missing his train because of a series of problems involving Orange County Transportation Authority buses.

California spends $60 million a year subsidizing intercity rail and has spent millions more on tracks and stations, he wrote. But “it seems more than a little silly to spend so much state money when some local transit operators don’t seem to care whether or not you can even get to the train station on time.”

Reed’s bus had taken him to the Santa Ana Transit Terminal. But the train was departing from the Santa Ana Regional Transportation Center a few miles away.

Not only were there no buses to carry him on to the transportation center, but no taxicabs or taxi call phones, either, Reed said. When he finally found a pay phone, the cab company didn’t know where the transit terminal was.

“It’s probably too much to ask” that the two terminals be merged or that there be buses to carry commuters between the two or that taxi phones be placed at the centers, he wondered in his journal. “If the transit pooh-bahs balk at that, could they at least post the phone number of the local cab company and the address of the facility near the pay phones?”

Reed also took a swipe at OCTA on Day 4, when he traveled by bus to spend Independence Day at Disneyland. Bus No. 43 pulled away just as bus No. 57 arrived with him and other park-bound riders at the Costa Mesa transfer point. “Why didn’t the driver of my bus have a way to let the driver of the other bus know he had passengers needing to transfer? That shouldn’t be that hard to do.”

At Disneyland, Reed discovered that the last No. 43 bus left about 9 p.m., long before the holiday fireworks show. “OCTA buses, it appears, were all shut down in the barn within an hour of sundown,” he wrote.

“How do kids [and adults, for that matter] without cars go to a movie in Orange County? How, in an allegedly sophisticated urban area like Orange County, can the OCTA board of directors just stop running the buses at sundown?”

Reed served on the Orange County agency and its predecessor, the Orange County Transportation Commission, for more than five years, ending in 1993.

“I guess I instinctively hold them to a higher standard than I should,” he wrote in one journal entry.

Los Angeles’ Metropolitan Transportation Authority also drew fire from Reed.

He was astounded by a bus driver he encountered in downtown Los Angeles on Day 18. She kept her personal radio on, ran a series of red lights, passed up a woman at a bus stop who tried to flag her down, gave a tongue-lashing (“Why didn’t you walk?”) to an elderly man who traveled a short distance and then almost drove away while another passenger tried to exit. He identified her by number and urged riders who see her behind the wheel to run for the door.

The MTA often left passenger Reed shaking his head.

“The MTA appears to be on the brink of making another one of its famous world-class blunders,” he warned on Day 7--four days before the Women’s World Cup soccer finals in Pasadena. “MTA, please don’t screw this up . . . don’t tell me you are not going to provide adequate transportation.”

Reed’s follow-up report on Day 10 was directed to county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, head of the MTA board. “While 90,185 spectators showed up at the Rose Bowl, Yvonne Burke’s MTA was AWOL,” he wrote.

His journal praises services such as Metrolink, the Dash commuter buses and a computerized trip-mapping system run by the Southern California Assn. of Governments.

Reed said he found you can get around Los Angeles on public transportation if you have patience. And it’s cheaper than driving (he spent $55 instead of the $290 it would have cost to use his Jeep Grand Cherokee).

As he waited Wednesday night for his bus, he said he hopes his journal prods other officials into occasionally using public transportation. But he acknowledged he can’t wait to get back behind the wheel of his own car.

That’s why on Thursday his entry for Day 28 started out this way: “Three days and counting. Well, if I were to ever to do this again, I would choose to do it in February. There are only 28 days in February. . . .”