Strike That Nobody Noticed Hit 450,000 Transit Riders Hard

Most people in Los Angeles, it would seem, could afford to dismiss the strike by Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus drivers and train operators as a mere irritant, an annoyance. There were complaints of more sluggish freeway commutes, of domestic help gone missing, but not much more. The big city transit strike that nobody noticed--this would be the story line most commonly attached to the 32-day shutdown of the nation’s second largest bus system.

A much different analysis could be mined early Wednesday morning along the MTA’s Line 720, one of the system’s new “Metro Rapid” routes. The line runs from Montebello to Santa Monica, straight through the midsection of the city, and with a daily ridership of 50,000 it constitutes the MTA’s busiest route.

For the people who boarded the red-and-white buses in the soupy darkness before sunup, the strike had been something beyond a municipal oddity, something more than merely irritating. The stories they told were of lost jobs and long walks to work, of dropped classes and savings sunk into rental cars, of one hard month.

“A lot of people like me have to use the bus,” explained Sandra Flores, a 20-year-old who was riding from her family home in downtown to UCLA, where she works as a teacher’s assistant in an elementary school program. “It made a big difference for us. I guess for people who had cars the strike wasn’t a big deal. For us, it was.”

After work each day, Flores takes night courses at Santa Monica College and then rides the bus back downtown. She doesn’t own a car, doesn’t possess a driver’s license. Her parents don’t own a car. She and her family, she said, have traveled by bus “forever.” She punctuated this bit of personal history with a shrug; it certainly didn’t strike her as odd.

The strike added a couple of hours to her commute both ways, and forced her to drop a Saturday class. Still, she considered herself fortunate. With some difficulty, she managed to cobble together a commute on various Santa Monica bus lines. Her mother, a janitor in Redondo Beach, had it tougher. During the strike, she was forced to walk a couple of dozen blocks through the middle of the city at around 3 every morning, after a company van dropped her off from her job. Why the van could not place her any closer to home was not clear.

The demographics along the 720 Line seemed to change from neighborhood to neighborhood, as did the curbside signage. In the course of an hour and a few minutes, one bus would pass by El Paso Shoes and Casa Olympica and the Better Life Organics warehouse and the Fred Jordan Mission and strip malls marked with signs written in Korean and, farther west, the Symbolic Motor Car Co. and L.A. Tanning and Marble World, ending a block from the beach. It was, as has been noted, a bus ride across Los Angeles, in all senses of the phrase.

On the Eastside, many of the men wore workingmen’s attire and carried their lunches in white plastic sacks; their heads would bob in sleep as the bus hurtled along Whittier Boulevard toward downtown. A 31-year-old man named Ernest Ortiz was dressed in a red jacket that identified him as an employee of Five-Star Parking. He picked through a young reader’s biography of Vincent van Gogh, pausing to say that his strike strategy had been to bunk with friends nearer to his downtown valet job.

There were riders in nursing uniforms, and mothers with school-age daughters. There were security guards and old-timers who hobbled aboard with canes. Going back from west to east, the passenger list would include a couple of suits; they tended to keep their heads buried deep in the morning newspaper.

Each rider was greeted with a yellow sign on the toll box that announced, in English and Spanish: “Welcome Back! Free Fare Today.” In general, most seemed remarkably stoic about the past month. The riders tended to side with the drivers, and there was talk of “bigwigs” and MTA mismanagement and “politics.” Some gave their names; others refused. Some tried mightily to find common lines of communication between their night school English and their questioner’s high school Spanish.

When pressed, a few quietly recorded personal losses. From a federal government employee: “I was late every day to work, every day.” From a hospital worker, named Shaneka Holliman: “Let’s see. The first rental car was about $500.” From two overnight clerks at a Santa Monica Rite Aid, both of whom asked to be identified only as L.J.:

“We walked!”

How far?

“A long way,” said L.J. No. 1.

“About an hour each way,” added L.J. No. 2.

Many told stories of others: an 85-year-old who couldn’t make a medical appointment; downtown pensioners who couldn’t “get to their checks” and took to panhandling in the elevators of their residential hotels.

The most frequently advanced line of political analysis coming out of the strike had it that bus riders like these were too low in place, and too small in numbers, to force a more rapid resolution of the stalemate.

As William Fulton, an author and urban planning expert, put it in an interview: “If you are going to go on strike, you have got to inconvenience the people responsible for resolving the strike.”

That view was summed up most succinctly in a headline in the Oct. 8 L.A. Times: “Why Aren’t Buses Missed? Simple: Everybody Drives.”

Another possible explanation, though, involves the scale of the metropolis, and its ability to hide entire cultures, entire citizenships, within its ever-expanding borders.

Los Angeles is so vast it can absorb things that might paralyze other cities. Olympics, national political conventions--they can come and go without disrupting the general populace a whit. And thus, maybe, it also was big enough to absorb without too many kinks in the day-to-day patterns a monthlong, citywide bus strike. This does not necessarily validate the assumption that “everybody” drives in Los Angeles.

In fact, the corridor from Montebello to Santa Monica--taking into account the No. 720 lines and the other, non-express lines that traverse it--is believed by transportation experts in the city to be the busiest bus corridor in the nation.

In fact, the MTA’s daily ridership of roughly 450,000 exceeds the entire population of Sacramento and nearly matches the general populaces of Long Beach, Tucson and New Orleans. It’s only when pitted against the entire sweep of Los Angeles that this overlooked citydom of bus riders seems to fade to insignificance. The hundreds of thousands of individual riders, of course, do not tend to traffic in such macro-views. They simply board, when they can, and ride.

The population of bus riders in the near term was diminished on the first day back from the strike. Riders midway through the route marveled at being able to find open seats. At least one rider said that, as a result of the strike, his L.A. bus days were finished.

“I lost my job,” said 50-year-old Frank Johnson of Culver City. For a couple of days, he had managed to hitchhike to his work as a chef’s assistant at an advertising firm’s cafeteria. He couldn’t stick with it, however, and eventually received formal notice that he had “abandoned” his $10.30-an-hour job and, therefore, was dismissed.

He was on his way to a public storage facility near downtown. He wanted to pick up a few things before leaving town the next day. The Compton native had read in the classified ad section that there was plenty of work for kitchen hands in Las Vegas.

How are you going to get there, Frank? he was asked.

“Going Greyhound,” he said.