Why Aren’t Buses Missed? Simple: Everybody Drives

What if you went on strike and no one cared? What if striking drivers brought to a standstill every bus in the nation’s second-largest metropolis--and life went on as usual?

As the Metropolitan Transportation Authority strike saunters into its 22nd day, that’s more or less what has happened. Yes, the strike has been horrible for some people--they’ve spent hours bicycling or walking to work or paying strangers to drive them or forfeiting wages and not working at all. Some small businesses have been hurt. And striking drivers watch with increasing anxiety as another week passes without paychecks.

But the freeways are not gridlocked, businesses have not closed and the public has not risen in outrage. Even negotiations between management and strikers lack much drama.

How could this happen? How could a crisis not happen?

Academicians have the answer but, really, you could have asked any 16-year-old. In the constellation of caricatures of Los Angeles residents--air-headed narcissists, fun-loving beachgoers--one shines true: Angelenos drive everywhere.

Only 2% of all travel in the city takes place on public transit. Only 4% of work commuting is done on public transportation, according to Brian Taylor, associate director for the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA.

But the bus strike has revealed something more startling beyond the truism that virtually everyone is driving:

In Los Angeles, whether you are rich or poor, you are likely to be connected somehow, some way, with a car and disconnected from the mass transit system. Whether you are a studio executive or the woman who cleans the studio executive’s house, you probably have a car. The guy at the carwash who cleans the car of the studio executive may have his own car. Maybe it’s a clunker--a $1,000 model that is barely insured or not insured at all. But it nonetheless serves as private transportation.

Salvadoran-born Francisco Acosta cleans windows in Malibu. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1985. “The first thing I did when I came here was get a car,” said Acosta, who lives on West Jefferson Boulevard, about 30 miles from where he works.

It’s not even a matter of everyone’s liking cars. Los Angeles has a vocal subculture of well-heeled residents who loathe driving and reminisce about how they walked all the time when they lived in New York, San Francisco or Boston.

But in a gargantuan city with a transit system that, even when it’s running, doesn’t begin to cover all that sprawl, a car is a meal ticket. A car is as necessary as food and shelter. Sometimes a car is shelter. Some homeless families live in minivans on streets in Santa Monica and Venice.

Consider the numbers: In Los Angeles County, with a population of approximately 9.4 million people, MTA buses, rail and subways move about 450,000 of them on any given day. There are 5.9 million cars and trucks registered in the county.

None of this means that poor people can drive around as effortlessly as Lexus-leasing professionals. Low-income workers struggle to keep their cars in gas and insurance and sell them periodically when money is tight. But even during a strike, they are largely mobile.

“If the bus drivers want to make an impact, they ought to go blockade the freeways,” said Joel Kotkin, senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University.

Certainly there are workers painfully affected by the strike. Immigrants, who account for as many as two-thirds of all transit riders in L.A. County, according to a USC study, are disproportionately hit. These are the workers joining carpools or walking long miles or biking or, in some cases, not going to work at all.

But the reality is that the economy muscles on without them--or with their replacements.

“Mass transit in Los Angeles is not essential to the economy,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “The sectors that are heavily dependent on mass transit--the ones that use service workers--have a greater flexibility in replacing those workers.”

Even as city and county officials tout the virtues of public transportation, the infrastructure conspires against the mass transit rider. Southern California was made for driving.

Veronica Sandoval, 30, said it would be impossible for her to work cleaning houses without a car. She has to travel from her South-Central home to jobs in Brentwood, Santa Monica and Palos Verdes.

Though they have little money, she and her husband would have even less without their cars. Together they earn a yearly income of about $20,000 to support themselves and their two children in a $550-a-month one-bedroom apartment. “The two girls sleep in the bedroom, and we sleep in the living room,” she said. Their car insurance costs about $115 a month.

In the 12 years since Sandoval arrived from Guatemala, she has had four cars. First she had a Pinto that her father bought her, then a Datsun 210, and then a 1986 Toyota Corolla that she crashed about three years ago. She carried only liability insurance, which paid to replace the other car in the accident.

“I lost everything,” said Sandoval, who is now a U.S. citizen.

Three months after the accident, she borrowed $1,125 from her mother--who lives here but does not drive--to buy a 1987 Corolla with 126,000 miles on it. “It took about six months to pay her back,” said Sandoval.

For a while, Sandoval shuttled her husband to his early morning factory job in Gardena. But it meant waking her young daughters before dawn to accompany her and her husband. It was exhausting. Sandoval’s husband now drives a 1986 Toyota Four Runner, bought for $4,500 with money provided, once again, by Sandoval’s mother. She has since been repaid.

As you move up the rungs of the economic ladder, one’s car reflects one’s progress. There is little solidarity with struggling bus riders or striking bus drivers among those who have advanced past reliance on public transportation.

“Most of us in the middle class have never been on a bus,” said Guerra. “Or we haven’t been on a bus in the last 10 years. Even if we have been on a bus, few of us have any intention of ever being on a bus again.”

Contrast that with New York City, where the transit system moves 6.6 million people around the five boroughs more efficiently than any car or taxi can. As a result, mass transit there functions as an equalizer. Secretaries and Wall Street lawyers take the subway. Celebrities take mass transit. The late John F. Kennedy Jr. rode subways, and so does the TV star Sarah Jessica Parker. In Los Angeles, movie and TV stars don’t take buses--unless they’re doing research for their roles.

If everyone in New York City drove, “the city would collapse,” said Fred Siegel, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, who studies and writes about large cities.

If everyone displaced by the MTA bus strike drove to work, traffic would be worse but not cataclysmically so. Guerra estimates there would be a 10% increase in traffic.

In Los Angeles, the bus system is so peripheral to city politics that Mayor Richard Riordan didn’t bother to cancel or cut short his bicycling vacation in France during the early days of the strike. In other cities with big public transit systems, like New York or Philadelphia, that would be career suicide.

“No mayor of New York could dream of being away when a transit strike occurred,” said Siegel. “It’s just not conceivable.”

In other cities, the newly arrived devote themselves to mastering the transit system. In Los Angeles, new residents devote themselves to acquiring cars.

“For me, a car is the most important thing to have,” said Reyna Bautista, who emigrated from El Salvador eight years ago and works in a coin laundry at 1st and Utah streets.

Some immigrants to Los Angeles were well aware of its reputation as a car city before they got here. Hyuk-min Kim, 28, had heard that while still in Korea. In fact, as far as he’s concerned, there is no public transportation. “In Korea, I had a license but I didn’t have a car,” said Kim, who lives downtown and sells clothing at a Los Angeles flea market. “Here, there’s no subway, no taxi, no bus. So now I have a license and a car.”

For most working-class immigrants, getting a car and a license to drive it are symbols of arrival. When Denise Andrade--born here of Mexican parents--got her driver’s license, it was a crowning achievement in her father’s eyes. She had U.S. citizenship, was in school and had a job. After getting her license, Andrade recalled her father’s declaring, “What else do you need?” He, too, has a driver’s license.

Andrade, now 19 and attending evening classes at El Camino College, is immersed in the car culture of Los Angeles. Although her 65-year-old mother does not know how to drive and is content to ride the bus or walk, Andrade has always despised taking the bus.

“I hate catching the bus, walking to the bus stop,” said Andrade, who lives in the South Bay. “Having your own car is so much more convenient than the Gardena bus system or the MTA.”

Now she drives a mid-’80s Toyota Cressida that she bought--with her parents’ help--for $3,000.

Upwardly mobile immigrants and others look to the day when they can forgo the wobbly public transit system, with its frequent delays and breakdowns. Even undocumented immigrants, who cannot legally obtain licenses or insurance--and risk hefty fines and confiscation of their vehicles for driving without them--buy and drive cars.

For the working poor in Los Angeles, it just makes sense to move off the bus and into a passenger car, according to Taylor, the UCLA transportation expert.

“When their income goes up, they buy cars,” he said. “For a lot of low-income workers, if they have to go to a really far-flung place, they have to get an auto. It’s just not worth 3 1/2 hours getting there.”

The strike has turned some car owners into carpool captains.

“In the morning, I go to South-Central and Central Los Angeles, San Pedro and Long Beach” to give some of his co-workers a ride, said Salvador Aguilar, one of 28 employees at the Bel Air Car Wash in Hollywood. “Without the bus, many people can lose their jobs.”

Since the strike began, Saul Gonzalez, 24, has been leaving his home at 5 a.m. to pick up three of his own employees and ferry them to work at the House of Trophies in Boyle Heights. “Once you find a job, then you’ll use any method to get there,” said Gonzalez about his employees. In this case, he is the method.

For everyone who doesn’t have to find a ride or hike on foot, the strike is an unfortunate but distant occurrence.

“I am sure it is difficult for those who can’t get to work, but it hasn’t impacted me much,” said Jason Delgado, a financial analyst eating lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen in downtown Los Angeles. “I would like it solved just so I wouldn’t have to hear about it so much.”

Others aren’t even listening. “I was out with some people just the other day who basically didn’t even realize there was a strike,” said Andrew Alvarez, a scriptwriter sipping coffee at the Coffee Bean nearby. “Sadly, it is reflective of the me generation.”

The scenario serves as a metaphor for Los Angeles, said Gregory Rodriguez, a fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington.

“It goes to the issue of what L.A. is: a disaggregated community of thousands of smaller communities. There’s no space in which we can all see ourselves coexisting.”

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Times staff writers Twila Decker, Jason Song, Nedra Rhone and Ofelia Casillas contributed to this story.

* NO REGRETS

Union chief Neil H. Silver says asking mechanics to return to work was hard but he’d do it again. B1