Judge Hears Debate on Bus Crowds

Fighting to overturn an order to buy 481 more buses, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority clashed with bus rider advocates in federal court Monday about whether enough progress has been made in reducing overcrowding on the nation’s second-largest bus system.

The MTA’s new attorney, Shirley M. Hufstedler, told Chief U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr. that “there cannot be any real doubt” that the transit agency has striven mightily to improve its bus service in the past three years.

But civil rights lawyer Constance M. Rice argued that the MTA’s data showing progress “masks an enormous amount of overcrowding” that continues on its buses.

Rice defended the order of Special Master Donald T. Bliss Jr. that MTA buy the extra buses, saying they are needed to remedy “massive violations” of a landmark 1996 consent decree. That decree requires the MTA to reduce overcrowding and improve bus service.

The MTA, Rice said, has decided “the consent decree needs to be rewritten and not enforced.”

After hearing more than four hours of testimony, Hatter recessed the hearing until this afternoon. He ultimately must rule on the MTA’s motion to set aside Bliss’ order.

Monday’s session was the first time since the consent decree was signed that Hatter has found himself in the middle of the long-running fight between the MTA and the bus riders.

Hatter presided over the case filed by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the Bus Riders Union, which alleged that the MTA discriminated against poor and minority bus riders by pouring billions of dollars into building subway and rail lines while the bus system deteriorated.

Unwilling to risk a trial, the MTA negotiated the consent decree with bus rider advocates. Hatter then appointed Bliss to oversee compliance with the decree’s requirements.

The judge listened intently and often asked questions Monday as witnesses for each side differed over what constitutes compliance with the first of three overcrowding standards that get progressively tougher over time.

The issue is central to the dispute about whether the MTA needs more buses--beyond the 2,095 new vehicles it plans to buy during the next five years--to ease overcrowding.

MTA’s Chief Operating Officer Allan Lipsky testified that he believes the agency is in compliance with the consent decree’s requirements to reduce overcrowding.

In the first three months of this year, Lipsky told Hatter, the MTA was in compliance with the overcrowding standard 98.2% of the time during the weekday morning commute. He portrayed the agency’s most recent performance as “a great deal better” than the 95% recorded in the last quarter of 1997.

The standard, called a target load factor, requires that an average of no more than 15 passengers be standing on an MTA bus during any 20-minute peak period.

However, Thomas A. Rubin, a former MTA official who is now a consultant for the bus riders, later presented his own charts using the same data that shows wide variations in MTA’s performance when measured on a weekly and monthly rather than a quarterly basis.

Rubin said that when the MTA reports data quarterly, it is averaging its performance over all its bus lines. He likened that approach to someone with one foot in a bucket of ice and the other foot in boiling water. “On the average, you’re comfortable,” he said.

Ted Robertson, who analyzes overcrowding data for the Bus Riders Union, testified that the MTA recorded violations of the overcrowding standard at some point on 70 of its 77 bus lines.

But David Yale, the MTA’s director of capital development, testified that the agency cannot find $196 million over the next five years to pay for operating the new buses ordered by Bliss. To divert funds from other programs would have a detrimental effect on the region’s transportation system, he said.

Earlier Monday, Hatter ruled that the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council cannot file a brief on behalf of the bus riders.

The MTA’s Hufstedler had argued against the groups’ intervention. Rice said the brief was appropriate because the MTA had raised environmental issues in challenging Bliss’ order.

Three MTA board members, County Supervisors Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, Gloria Molina and Zev Yaroslavsky, attended much of the hearing along with numerous officials, lawyers and bus riders.

Outside the courtroom, Burke, who is now chairwoman of the MTA, said the agency is in an impossible position.

“You have to have the money to buy the buses and operate them,” she said.

She said the MTA must finish the subway to North Hollywood and comply with a state law to provide funds for constructing a light rail line from Union Station to Pasadena.

Yaroslavsky, the only board member to oppose the appeal to Hatter, said the issue is “an esoteric debate about how you determine if a bus rider on the MTA system is experiencing overcrowding or not.”