Strike Puts City on the Road to Uncertainty

More than two weeks after it began, a strike against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has put thousands of extra cars on Los Angeles’ streets and freeways, cost businesses about $40 million, caused large numbers of people to miss medical appointments, and kept many from work and school.

But on Monday, the eventual impact remained unclear as mechanics and supervisors agreed to return to work while the drivers continued on strike.

Echoing what are probably the sentiments of riders, politicians and businesspeople, mechanic Fernando Sauceda said he is confused about the future. He and his wife, Cynthia, a dispatcher at MTA headquarters, have been on strike.

“We’re going back to work, I guess,” said Sauceda, a member of the Amalgamated Transit Union, minutes after watching a TV news report about his union’s return. “But it still seems too shaky, too weird.”

The strike’s impact can be measured in a variety of ways.

Freeway traffic is up about 5%, Caltrans officials estimate, while traffic on city streets is up about 8%, according to a survey by the city Department of Transportation. But the impact varies geographically.

A spot check by the Los Angeles Unified School District in the first week of the strike found that about half the high schools in the district were unaffected by the strike, whereas others that serve mostly poor student populations--for instance, Jefferson and Los Angeles high schools--had as many as 200 more daily absences than usual. Two relatively affluent high schools--Westchester and Palisades--reported fewer absences than usual.

Since then, school officials said, the strike has had a fairly minor impact, with the vast majority of the 16,000 students who use MTA buses finding other means of getting to school.

Hospitals and medical clinics have also been affected disproportionately, according to how dependent their patients are on public transit. Cass Ben Levi, a spokeswoman for an association of private clinics, said some hadn’t been affected. But at Clinica Monsenor Oscar A. Romero on impoverished South Alvarado Street, patient visits have dropped by nearly 60%, prompting the clinic to start offering its own van service to patients who would otherwise take the bus.

At Los Angeles County’s King/Drew Medical Center, cancellations for appointments are up 20% from average, said Sharon Wanglin, a spokeswoman for the county Health Department.

But cancellations are lower at other county hospitals. And there have been virtually none at others, such as Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar, and El Monte Comprehensive Medical Center. El Monte is served by the Foothill Transit District, which is not on strike.

The Los Angeles Free Clinic, which sees 80,000 patients a year, has had a no-show rate of 30% to 35% since the strike began, up from a norm of 10% or less, said Executive Director Mary Rainwater.

Last Monday, she said, only two of the 11 patients scheduled for dental appointments showed up. All of the cancellations were because of the strike.

“That is absolutely unheard of, because it is so hard to get dental care for free that we are constantly turning people away,” Rainwater said. “That was a real shocker for us.”

The impact on most other businesses is more difficult to determine. However, Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp., calculates that the strike is costing the region $2.3 million a day in lost sales, wages and productivity.

Economists and business leaders say most of the losses are probably at smaller businesses that serve predominantly poor clientele. Overall, “I would say the impact has been fairly minimal,” said Sung Sohn, chief economist for Wells Fargo Bank.

If the strike continues, the walkout by bus and rail drivers could begin to chip away at the wider economy, especially if it is joined by other threatened strikes. Another risk may be to the region’s image and psyche, said economists, social scientists and business leaders.

“It impacts this region, not only politically, not only economically, but morally,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at Claremont Graduate University. She said she worries that the strike is undoing some of the progress made since the 1992 riots seared the city with the brand of class conflict.

Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, said the strike occurred “just when it seemed that L.A. was getting back--the economy was getting back, the Democratic National Convention was a success.” Now, he said, the strike sends a message “that the system is breaking down.”

The strike began just after midnight Sept. 16, after the MTA and the drivers union failed to agree on a proposed contract that included $23 million worth of cuts in overtime costs.

The MTA has said it must reduce overtime and change work rules to lower the costs of operating its buses.

The union says its drivers have come to rely on the overtime and can’t afford to lose it.

MTA officials say they understand the costs of the strike. But they say the costs are worth the goal of attaining long-term financial stability by management and work rule changes.

Spokesman Ed Scannell said, “We didn’t call the strike. It’s been devastating to a large number of people, the bulk of which have no other way to get around. . . . We’d like nothing better than to see the strike end.”

Union leaders say they have had no choice but to oppose what they consider to be an unfair contract that would be a setback for their members.

Mayor Richard Riordan, who declined to let the strike interrupt his cycling vacation in France, downplayed its impact when he returned home.

Traffic is worse, the mayor said, “but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t as bad as it had been described to me--at least what I’ve seen.”

He expressed some sympathy for stranded bus riders, but mostly marveled at their resilience. True, he said, the poor are being hurt by the strike, but “somehow or other they cope. We don’t give them enough credit for being able to cope in a tough world.”

“These are tough cookies, no doubt about it,” said economist Kyser.

“But the big question is, how long all these jury-rigged commuting efforts can last.”

There are signs that the patchwork is starting to fray.

At American Apparel, a Los Angeles T-shirt maker, some production employees are showing up late, leaving early or being forced to skip work for want of transportation, said owner Dov Charney.

A Canadian native who took buses as a child in Montreal, Charney is dismayed at the lack of urgency or outrage in Los Angeles, now that nearly 500,000 residents have suddenly been stranded.

“It’s not hitting the middle class, so nobody cares,” said Charney. “This just magnifies the differences in a city as stratified economically as Los Angeles. . . . It’s aggression against the poor.”

Ezunial Burts, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, predicted a fast recovery if the strike ends soon.

But he, too, worries that the strike could eventually cause serious damage. For one thing, he said, employers will see that they can’t count on workers who rely on public transit.

“The longer this drags on,” Burts said, “the more we worry.”

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Dependence on Public Transport

The map below shows the level of mass-transit dependency in Los Angeles County based on U.S. Census data. Transit dependency varies with household income, the availability of a car, the number of school-age children and proportion of elderly people in a neighborhood. As expected, lower-income areas are far more dependent on mass transit than upper-income areas. As income and auto availability increase, mass-transit dependency falls.