In Reversal, MTA Votes to Buy Clean Fuel Buses

Confronted with an unyielding wall of public and official disapproval, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s directors executed an abrupt U-turn on Thursday and voted unanimously to purchase 370 new natural gas-powered buses rather than diesel vehicles.

After hearing impassioned pleas from bus riders and environmentalists, school teachers and students, air quality officials and Los Angeles residents suffering from asthma and bronchitis, the MTA board rejected the recommendation of the agency’s staff and voted to remain the nation’s leader in the operation of clean-fuel transit buses.

“This is not the time for us to go back on that commitment,” said county Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, chairwoman of the MTA. “We would have been the laughingstock of people throughout the nation if we made this quick decision to try to avoid rules that are being considered both by [the Environmental Protection Agency] on a national level” and locally by the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

Burke said the proposal to buy diesel buses just three weeks before the AQMD considers adoption of regulations preventing transit operators in the smoggy Los Angeles region from purchasing more diesel buses would have left the impression that “we’re trying to beat the rules.”

When the three-hour-long discussion began, no one could predict with certainty the ultimate outcome. It was not until hours later, when Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan announced that he would come down on the side of compressed natural gas buses, that the verdict was sealed.

The mayor had been a driving force in getting the MTA to consider buying diesel buses. But after he aired his concerns, all of the pro-diesel votes on the board quickly fell into line.

The mayor said later that “in selling Los Angeles as a leader, this is a good move. It makes the city more appealing to businesses throughout the world.”

The board’s 10-0 vote to buy more natural gas-powered buses was greeted by loud applause from members of the Bus Riders Union unaccustomed to winning fights before the transit board.

Outside the MTA’s headquarters, Eric Mann, leader of the bus riders group, publicly thanked Burke and Riordan and expressed relief that the agency had made what he felt was the right decision without being ordered to do so by a court.

Mann called the vote to buy more natural gas buses “the great reversal.” But he said it also represented a major breakthrough. “We convinced the public this was a life and death issue.” He said his group assembled a coalition “where civil rights meets the environment and meets mass transit.”

The speakers--many of whom said they ride the bus regularly--expressed concern that they would be most at risk from diesel soot, which the state has determined can cause cancer.

Judy Brady, an elementary school teacher from Brentwood, read letters from her first-grade students calling on Riordan to vote for cleaner natural gas buses.

Laura Pulido, an associate professor of geography at USC, told the directors she would be shocked if they voted to buy diesel buses. She said such a move, which would intensify pollution in central Los Angeles, would be a “classic case of how racism works.”

From Bus Riders Union members wearing their trademark yellow T-shirts and new masks adorned with a skull and crossbones to representatives of the AQMD and environmental groups in business suits, the speakers against diesel kept coming to the podium.

AQMD Executive Director Barry Wallerstein urged the MTA board to “stay the course” and stick with the agency’s alternative-fuel policy adopted in October 1993. He said natural gas buses offer “the cleanest, best technology at this point in time.

After the vote, Wallerstein said “Mayor Riordan and the MTA board are to be complimented for their bold support for clean air. This action is a reflection of the community’s concern about the health effects of diesel emissions.”

S. David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, took dead aim at arguments advanced by Arco that diesel buses using low-sulfur fuel and equipped with particulate traps similar to catalytic converters on cars can be made as clean as natural gas buses. “There is no such thing as clean diesel,” Freeman said. “Diesel is inherently dirty.”

He told the MTA board that “you dare not depart” from a policy to buy cleaner buses in a region that has long had the worst air quality in the nation. Freeman suggested the MTA consider electric buses as an alternative.

Tom Conner, the MTA’s executive officer for transit operations, unsuccessfully urged the board to buy the diesel buses to minimize the risk posed by having a bus fleet heavily dependent on natural gas technology.

After the decision was made, Conner estimated that with the award of a $115.4-million contract to buy the new buses, 86% of the MTA’s active fleet of more than 2,240 vehicles will be running on compressed natural gas within three years.

At the behest of Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, the MTA board agreed to retrofit its existing diesel buses with particulate traps and use ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel once the results of testing on a dozen of the agency’s buses is complete. The agency also will spend $2 million to support continued work on an advanced bus design and encourage the development of newer fuel cell technology.

The controversy surrounding the bus purchase completely overshadowed the MTA board’s adoption of a $2.5-billion budget for the coming fiscal year that will finance more hours of bus service, service on the subway from Union Station to North Hollywood, and new rapid bus lines from the Westside to the Eastside and across the San Fernando Valley.