The Travails of Bus Ridership

I rarely use L.A. public transit except for an occasional LAX connection. However, I recently needed to travel from my home in Culver City to Hacienda Heights--approximately 30 miles--to buy a car. Rather than impose on someone to take me to the car, I opted to take the bus. I planned for a two-hour journey. Here is what happened:

For route and scheduling information, I called MTA’s information number. Sounding like a choppier version of the lobotomized HAL computer from “2001, A Space Odyssey,” the automated system’s instructions were nearly impossible to understand. I had to play the message repeatedly to write down the instructions.

Once I got the instructions, I walked to the Fox Hills Transit Center, arriving a few minutes ahead of the scheduled 9:34 a.m. departure from “berth 6” of the southbound 110 bus. Well, there were no such numbers on any of the bus berths. As would be the case throughout my journey, friendly fellow bus riders helped me by directing me to the appropriate spot.

From the time that the first bus arrived at 9:40 a.m. until I got off my fourth bus (a northbound 471) at Hacienda Boulevard and Three Palms Street at 1:03 p.m., I had no opportunity to relax because the drivers (whom I asked to alert me to my stop) barely knew the stops on their routes and knew nothing of connecting routes. Nor was this information available in any form on the buses or at the stops. To orient myself, I constantly had to consult the Thomas Guide I had luckily brought along.

As the trip progressed I came to feel more and more like a prisoner of the MTA rather than a patron. I could not leave the bus stops to get out of the weather (cold and rainy that day), or to find something to eat or use a restroom since leaving my appointed transfer point would have put me at risk of missing my connection--which invariably ran only once an hour. I missed one such connection because the bus (an eastbound 111) passed my stop at full capacity.

Posted routes and schedules in every bus or train stop are standard features of transit systems in virtually every European city of any size. Why not here?

My trip was, doubtless, far from the longest or most uncomfortable a person could take on the MTA. Still, it was enough to make clear one overriding reality: The MTA is a transit system, at least as far as its bus service is concerned, that has utter disregard for its patrons. Is it because riders are almost exclusively powerless and “invisible”: the young, the old, the disabled, ethnic minorities and the working poor?