Next stop: an insider’s perspective on those who maintain and operate the MTA bus. They provide a transit lifeline to countless others who wait as it gets... : Ready to Rumble

In the gray hours of urban night, a light mist thickens into drizzle. Industrial lights bounce off the tiny droplets, filling the Carson sky with a soft orange glow, like charcoal on the verge of ash.

Beneath this orange veil, Carlos Vargas walks with his head down, keeping the rain out of his eyes and his feet out of puddles. Moving quickly, he negotiates a series of yellow crosswalks that seem to stitch together the vast MTA Division 18 bus yard near the San Diego Freeway.

Vargas, 52, has been an MTA bus driver for 10 years. He works the “extra board,” which means he covers a different route each day for drivers out sick or on vacation. Today, a Monday, he has drawn Bus 4740, a 4-year-old NeoPlan 440 that will spend the next 15 hours traversing the 25-mile 60 Line from the Long Beach Transit Plaza to downtown Los Angeles.

For most commuters, buses are either easily ignored elements of the urban landscape or impassable slow boats that tie up the right lane. But for more than half a million Angelenos, buses are the lifeline of daily existence in a city where just getting from one place to another can be a day’s work.

Eighteen agencies run buses in Los Angeles County alone, but the Metropolitan Transit Authority is the heart of the overlapping systems, using 1,800 buses to cover 231,149 miles over 191 routes each day. Carrying four out of five local bus passengers across its 10 divisions, MTA is the second-largest transit system in the country.

And it could get bigger. A court-appointed overseer ordered the MTA earlier this month to buy 532 new buses and hire more drivers and mechanics to ease chronic overcrowding.

MTA directors, though, decided Thursday to appeal by seeking “clarification and possible modifications” to the order, which it described as “artificial and too costly.” The move was protested by bus supporters, including the Bus Riders Union, who demanded MTA comply with the order. Mayor Richard Riordan, though, said he wants a “more practical” plan worked out.

4740’s Daily Checkup

Despite its relative youth, Bus 4740--a 45-seat 40-footer built outside Denver--already bears the marks of hard use. It’s in good shape mechanically, but after more than 84,000 miles it rattles as it rolls, and taggers have left their signatures on seat covers in the back.

Ugliness, though, runs softcover deep. The seats are still seats, the bus runs smoothly, and for 90 commuters this morning, Bus 4740 will be the difference between a dry ride or a long walk in the rain.

To get to Carson in time for his 5 a.m. shift, Vargas left his home in Riverside at about 3 a.m. After picking up his paperwork and transfer slips inside Division 18’s offices, he heads out through the yard, finding Bus 4740 among the 47 rows of 209 buses that will roll out this morning.

It might be the start of the day for Vargas, but it’s just another part of the cycle for 4740. Late the previous night, the bus was cleaned out, refueled, washed and then parked. In the wee hours of morning, a night worker walked the lot to list which buses were where. So when Vargas picked up his assignment, he knew exactly where to find the bus--the last spot in Row 21.

Vargas boards the bus and begins his checklist. Lights. Brakes. Wipers. Other drivers go through the same routine on other buses, the dark rows awakening in a flurry of rumbling engines and blinking lights, like surreal giant fireflies. If anything is wrong with a bus, a driver can trade it for another while mechanics tend to the problem.

But everything works fine on Bus 4740 and by 5:30 a.m. Vargas rolls it toward a last staging area, where he checks the automatic wheelchair ramp. Then he hits the highway, taking the 405 to the 710 south to the Long Beach Transit Plaza at 1st Street and Long Beach Boulevard.

Friend Persuaded Him

Vargas, a father of two grown children, became a bus driver, fittingly enough, by a circuitous route. A native of Cuzco, Peru, he came to the U.S. as a student on scholarship to UCLA, where he was to study economics. But he fell in love with a Nicaraguan woman he met in an English as a second language class, gave up college, and four years later they married, starting a life together.

After stints in the import-export and insurance businesses, he was persuaded by a friend to join him as a bus driver. The hours are long and hard, but the pay is OK--new hires make $10 an hour and veterans earn twice that. And Vargas, who admits to wanderlust, never has to worry about sitting in one place too long.

His first stop is at the Transit Center at 5:57 a.m. No one is waiting, but at the next stop on 5th Street, three people get on, pay $1.35 each and take their seats in silence. The bus heads northward, following Long Beach Boulevard to Pacific Boulevard in Southgate, then Pacific Boulevard to 7th Street before snaking through downtown to its last stop at Union Station. Passengers mostly board at the southern end of the route.

Nearly all are Latino or African American, a function of economics and the neighborhoods the bus traverses. On this day, all board dripping rainwater, and most close their eyes after they settle into their seats, sneaking in a few more minutes of rest before getting to their destinations. The atmosphere is heavy with a sense of resigned patience, the weight of a rainy start to the work week.

“I ride it because I have no car,” says Stephanie Cole, 43, who boarded in Long Beach as part of a daily bus routine that takes her to a church in South Central for morning prayers, then southeast to Seal Beach where she’s a home-care health worker for residents of Leisure World. “If I had a car, I wouldn’t ride it.”

Salvador Lopez rides for the same reason. He lives in Long Beach and works in a machine shop in El Segundo. Without a car, he relies on a mix of mass transit, taking the 60 Line to the Long Beach/I-105 station, arriving about 6:30 to catch a Metro Green Line train west to El Segundo.

Clementine Enriquez, 21, has an easier commute, boarding the bus near Artesia Boulevard in Compton, then riding about 45 minutes to Santa Fe Avenue and 15th Street, near the garment factory where she works.

For the first 10 minutes of the ride, she tends to her makeup, touching up her eyebrows with a pencil as the bus bounces along. By the time Bus 4740 reaches Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the seats are filled and people crowd the aisle, most of them silent, though snatches of Spanish conversation drift among them. After three years of commuting by bus, Enriquez is used to the routine, she says. It has become part of the rhythm of her life.

The bus has its own rhythm--accelerating, then slowing. The sounds are muted. The shuffle of feet as people board and get off. The metallic clinks of the fare box. The squeak and click of the windshield wipers. Except for an occasional “Good morning” and admonishing “next time make it $1.35” to a cash-strapped passenger, Vargas drives in silence.

It’s a stressful job, he says later. Car drivers think buses are lumbering things easily cut off, which means Vargas has to stay alert to avoid jamming on the brakes and sending his standing passengers flying. On this morning’s commute, in the rain, the passengers are well-behaved. It’s not always so.

“I like working rainy days because only good people get on the bus,” Vargas says. “The people who ride buses just to kill time don’t come out. And most of those people want to argue, to make trouble. They have nothing to lose.”

But the stress of driving in rush-hour traffic through a pelting rain takes its own toll. By 9:15 a.m., when driver Tony Thomas spells him at the Long Beach/Green Line station on the return trip from downtown, Vargas is ready for his break.

‘I’m Always Stiff’

By now, Bus 4740 has settled into the day’s full routine. Thomas drives it for about 2 1/2 hours until Beverly Brown, 43, takes over just before noon, which is also about when the rain stops and the skies clear.

Vargas and Thomas will go on to cover different lines in the afternoon. But the 60 Line is Brown’s regular route, and she’ll drive 4740 until the end of the shift, arriving back at the Division 18 yard a little after 9 p.m.

“I’m always stiff,” she says that evening as she waits for attendants to remove the fare box, Bus 4740’s last stop before she parks it in line for cleaning and refueling. “I sit a lot.”

Some nine hours of driving might make most people cranky. But Brown says she usually stays in a good mood. She prefers working the overnight shift, when both traffic and the passenger load are light. But this late shift is her second preference.

She and her three children--ages 22, 8 and 4--recently moved back to Compton from a house she bought in Moreno Valley, so Brown could watch over her mother, who has developed Alzheimer’s disease. And Brown is in the process of a divorce that has left her with a flood of bills.

“It seems like nothing goes right, that it all falls to me,” Brown says. “But I have to keep doing my thing for my babies.”

Economic need also motivated Jacci Lindsey, 33, of Gardena. She spent several years trying to land her job cleaning out buses from 5:30 p.m. to 2 a.m. Around 9:30 p.m., Lindsey uses a gardener’s leaf blower to move debris toward the bus’ front door, where a vast vacuum tube sucks it all out and into a compactor. She hopes, she says, to do well enough in this job to earn a transfer to the mechanic division.

There, mechanics and other workers make repairs--from major overhauls to replacing windshield wipers--as they’re needed, and provide routine maintenance such as brake inspections every 1,000 miles. Mechanic Robert Morris says the workload varies, ranging from light nights with about 10 buses to floods of 50 or more.

A Relaxing Drive Home

Bus 4740 has been running well and doesn’t need any mechanical work on this night. So after Lindsey checks the compressed natural gas tank and shields for leaks or cracks, Rhonda Lucas fills it up. Then Lucas opens the engine covering at the back of the bus, checking fluid levels and adding oil before closing the lid and using a push broom dipped in cleaning solution to scrub away road grit caked in places where the automated bus washer can’t reach.

When she’s done, Bruce Walker takes over, driving the bus through a massive carwash before parking it near the spot where Vargas had picked it up nearly 17 hours earlier.

By now, Vargas is home in bed in Riverside. It’s the end of his own daily ritual, and his own hard commute.

Which he hasn’t minded. After the hours of stop-and-go traffic, of weaving his bus in and out of lanes and dealing with the disparate moods of passengers, Vargas finds his own trip home relaxing.

Because he does it alone.

“I roll down the window,” he says, “put on my music, and drive.”