A City Bus Line: The Job That Nobody Really Wants

“It looks at this point like we are in for the long haul.”

--James Williams, United Transportation Union

*

So the MTA talks are off again and Los Angeles remains stranded. Not so Greater Los Angeles.

It is evening rush hour in the San Gabriel Valley and we are aboard the No. 274. The bus is prompt. The seats are new. The aisles are wide. No one is standing. The driver, a guy named Yith Dara, says that in the four years he’s done this route, he’s never been threatened, hassled or sworn at. “If somebody writes the graffiti on the window or something,” he confided, laying over outside a leafy park in Whittier, “by the nighttime, it’s gone.”

Not that graffiti get written often. The No. 274 runs through middle-class suburbs. Dara works for Foothill Transit, one of those lean, clean other transit districts the Metropolitan Transportation Authority envies so nakedly.

It is districts like Foothill that the MTA holds up for comparison when it says its striking drivers are overpaid and its costs must be pared back. Foothill spends $62.34 per hour to run a bus; the MTA’s hourly cost is more like $98.66. Trouble is, the two districts are apples and oranges. The MTA has actual employees; Foothill outsources. The MTA drivers get paid more, but they also endure things unimagined on suburban routes. The bulk of the MTA’s riders don’t wait for the bus outside pretty green parks with little tiled fountains. They wait along potholed streets where the bus has to grind to a halt every couple of minutes because the demand for a seat is so stupefyingly enormous. They pile in by the messy, costly hundreds of thousands--whining, carping, defacing, wearing-and-tearing.

The MTA, in other words, is a city bus line.

And in the long haul, no one--not even in the ostensibly public sector--wants to be the city in Greater Los Angeles.

*

*

It is the gift and the curse of this place that it ranges across a vast urban polity and one of the world’s great suburbs, and that it’s so big that the two entities need never cross paths. Don’t like seeing poor people? Find a new offramp. Don’t like the smell of downtown? Hang in Old Pasadena. Don’t like the public schools? A couple miles and you’re in a whole new school district without even leaving the metropolis.

Private lives rule here, and private interests. This has made for some amazing backyards, but it has also left this place stunted civically. That’s because private is all about interests and public is, at least in part, about needs and connection. Public amenities--which are marks of a society’s maturity--tend to be seen, not as signs of having arrived, but as indulgences. Sentiment beyond self-interest just feels too big.

So it’s no surprise that the suburban fad now is the private transit district. Nor that Greater L.A.’s biggest, most urban transit district has been financed and managed, not like a priority, but like an extra, in fits and starts. Nor that the MTA feels politically compelled now to compare itself fiscally, not with other big cities, but with secondary communities, such as the San Gabriel Valley and Santa Monica.

Break the MTA up, calls Los Angeles’ mayor. But once all the nice suburbs have been peeled off, there’s still the city, with all its messy, grimy, labor-intensive, high cost. It’s a dirty job, but somebody, sooner or later, must serve it. With no support from the suburbs, who, pray tell, will indulge in that bothersome long haul?

*

*

It would be nice to predict that the long haul of this bus strike won’t be so long, really. But it’s a better bet that the people who ride the buses--and to some extent, maybe, their employers--will bear the brunt of this for as long as it takes.

A good number of these riders, after all, clawed their way across oceans and continents to get here. More than most people, they understand that it’s almost a rule that all things in life take longer than they ought to. They’ll be stoic. The baby-sitters will find a way to the Westside, the schoolkids will ditch or carpool, the bandit cabs will run rampant in Pico-Union, the rush-hour traffic will worsen--and it will all happen in those urban quarters where, in L.A. as in space, no one can hear you scream.

The drivers’ demand to share in prosperous times won’t disappear. Nor will the MTA’s irreducible problem: It either has to find new money or cut costs.

Maybe one side will cave. Maybe the high price of gas--and the accompanying gas tax windfall--will ease things. Maybe lightning will strike and the taxpayers will realize that you get what you pay for. But positioning the urban core to be even more stranded than it is now seems a lightweight’s solution. That suburban smallness of spirit is beneath a great city--long haul.

*

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.