Sardine Packer Passes for Transit Agency

It’s 7 in the morning on a school day and a bus is pulling up to Christion Gagen’s stop at Wilshire and Western, but he doesn’t climb aboard. This one’s too crowded.

“By the time I pay,” says the 15-year-old University High School student, “the seats would be gone.”

So he waits for another bus, then another, then another, then another, then another, then another.

Buses are chugging up every couple of minutes on the 720 Rapid line, but more and more people are waiting to board, and Gagen is caught in this daily game of jockeying and strategizing to get a seat for his cross-town journey.

“You got little old ladies hooking in and stepping right in front of you,” he says, holding his position and guarding his left flank. “I hope people let me do the same thing when I get old.”

It could be worse. A bus on the 357 line has busted down at the peak of rush hour and sits like a dying rhino on Western Avenue.

Gagen finally boards the seventh bus, which has plenty of seats. But before we travel a mile west, between 10 and 15 people are standing.

“It’s the same when I come home,” Gagen says. “After football practice, you want a seat. But sometimes you’ll have as many people standing up as there are sitting down.”

The solution is apparent, it seems, to everyone except the people running the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Two weeks ago, in a decision that reopens the question of whether the “M” in MTA stands for Misguided, or perhaps Mismanaged, the board voted to plow ahead with a years-long, losing battle against a decree that would put more buses on the street.

Even if you buy the MTA’s argument against more buses, there’s a problem here. The decree did not sail down out of the sky one day. The MTA helped write it in response to charges that the agency was packing low-income and minority riders into broken-down cattle coaches while spending like thieves--$300 million a mile--on rail lines.

The MTA, practicing an indecipherable form of math, has its own peculiar ideas about how many buses it ought to buy and how many riders ought to be standing up as a matter of routine. The problem is that everyone but Judge Judy has looked at the decree, and not one person has seen it the MTA’s way.

A federal judge sided with bus riders.

A special master sided with bus riders.

A panel of federal judges sided with bus riders.

A second panel of federal judges sided with bus riders.

To even the most casual observer, a pattern seems to have developed. And yet, undiscouraged by four straight whiffs and mounting legal costs, the MTA board has voted to appeal to the highest court in all the land.

John Fasana, the board chair, and Roger Snoble, the agency chief, told me they need clarification on how to determine compliance with the decree.

Pay attention then, boys, and let’s see if this helps clear it up:

You lost. You lost. You lost. And you lost again.

Buy more buses.

“The Supreme Court justices are very busy people,” says Eric Mann, founder of the Bus Riders Union. “If you want more clarification, call your psychiatrist.”

MTA bosses are also carping and moaning about not getting credit for the improvements they’ve made.

So here’s some credit:

Yes, the MTA has bought more buses and service seems to be better. The Rapid line runs on short intervals and serves as a model for what bus service can be, and there’s a terrific bus-traffic supervisor at Wilshire and Western who should be running the entire agency.

Derick Mahome knows half the riders by name, and works up a sweat helping them make connections as they come up from the train station or other bus lines.

But the bus division has 90% of MTA’s riders and only half its budget. We happen to be living in a county with 8 million cars, and the MTA just doesn’t know whether it makes sense to add 130 buses to a fleet of about 2,000.

One hundred thirty buses.

That’s what the MTA is quibbling over in a region that violated clean air standards 100 times in 2001. L.A. happens to be a place, I might add, that’s laid out in such a way that buses make more sense than rail.

And then Fasana and Snoble have the nerve to argue that ridership on all forms of public transportation is just not increasing enough to justify big outlays.

Well, first of all, boys, I don’t recall any penny-pinching when MTA royalty erected that half-billion-dollar palace in a city with downtown buildings that sit vacant.

And secondly, let me take a stab at just a few reasons ridership isn’t on the rise:

* With the average bus ride between 60 and 90 minutes, no one wants to have to stand up. So only those who have no choice--such as students like Christion Gagen, or the housekeepers who commute to the Westside homes of MTA lawyers and managers--are willing to go by bus.

* The escalator at the south end of the Red Line Civic Center station is broken more often than it’s fixed, with stairs dismantled and stacked against the wall like Rose Parade bleachers. Can anybody at the MTA find the right screwdriver and fix this darn thing once and for all?

* You’re driving past Sunset and Figueroa during rush hour, and you see armies of people on the street with looks of dread. What can it be? Did they reinstitute the draft? No. They’re waiting to horseshoe themselves onto the next overcrowded bus. They could not possibly look more miserable, and nothing in this picture tells you to park the car tomorrow and go MTA, no matter how horrific traffic is.

We need more buses, more trains, more bike lanes, and more good reasons to get more people out of their cars.

What we need most of all are leaders willing to reimagine the metropolis, not reexamine the decree.

Buy the buses already.

*

Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com