Too Much Suffering for Too Long

The buses are rolling again today and the trains are to follow suit Thursday, more than a month after a strike by Metropolitan Transportation Authority drivers and mechanics stranded nearly half a million regular riders in Los Angeles County and environs. Those riders, most of them working poor or disabled, had to make enormous efforts to get to work, school, stores and doctors’ offices; they hitchhiked, walked, rode bicycles or got rides in any car or truck that could move. They survived, but they suffered, and for far too long.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson entered the talks last Friday in a mediator role, taking part in the Monday session that ended in a tentative agreement after a long night of shuttling back and forth. He is due a good share of the credit for ending this strike. Mayor Richard Riordan, who controls four votes on the 15-member MTA board, was also there--at the end, though he missed the crucial first days--to push along the belated endgame.

As the strike wore on, it was harder and harder to believe that it was all about $23 million a year in savings--mere peanuts in the transit system’s yearly budget of $2.5 billion. Given that the MTA’s biggest push was to cut overtime pay and increase the use of part-time drivers, the striking drivers’ United Transportation Union maintained that the agency was really out to weaken the union, an opinion that gained credibility as time wore on. The union was on the defensive from the beginning, fighting to retain rights it already had. In the end the compromise made by the union will allow the MTA to hire more lower-paid part-time drivers, and there was no big raise to make up the pay lost during the strike.

Equally aggravating to the bus-riding public ought to be the fact that the MTA spent $1 million on strike-related public relations, including radio, television and print advertising at times sharply critical of the striking drivers. The MTA also revealed that it paid more than $1 million to labor consultants and to maintain its negotiating headquarters at the Pasadena Hilton.

In any case, politics and power were as much on the table as money. It was no surprise that the strike settlement came half a day after a dozen state legislators from Los Angeles County demanded answers in probing the causes of the prolonged strike.

More effective pressure on both the union and the MTA negotiators could probably have settled this strike in half the time, but the political response was absent in car-dependent Los Angeles.

Any transit strike causes at least a temporary downturn in ridership in its wake, and long walkouts usually cause a greater loss, with riders having found other ways to get where they want to go. The city’s clogged streets and shaky air quality cannot afford more cars; it is up to the MTA to get its riders back and eventually lure more. The agency is off to a good start in its decision to honor September’s monthly bus passes for the rest of October. And everyone will receive free rides in the first five days of renewed service.

In the end, what will bring riders back is service. More fast service like the Metro Rapid buses, more comfortable trains like those of the Red Line and Blue Line, clean, safe, comfortable buses and better routes. Every improvement will make it more likely that new riders are on the buses by choice, not necessity.

It’s a relief that this long transit strike is over. The walkout was a punishing setback for riders that was compounded by the stubbornness of a union that needed to appear it had extracted a win, the indifference of the larger populace and the related disdain of its politicians.