MTA Weighs ‘Hub and Spoke’ Routes

Los Angeles transit officials, rethinking the most basic delivery of the county’s bus service, have quietly begun to develop a plan to replace a decades-old patchwork of bus routes with a new “hub and spoke” route system.

The idea, which is in such an early stage that few within the Metropolitan Transportation Authority know about it, is seen as a way to attract new riders and save money, said John Catoe, the MTA deputy chief executive who is spearheading the plan.

“We’ve got to start attracting people who are in their cars -- getting them not only onto our trains, but onto buses -- and we’re going to do that,” Catoe said.

The heart of the proposal is the creation of transit centers -- or hubs -- throughout Los Angeles County. Early plans call for 19 hubs at popular destinations and job centers such as UCLA, Warner Center in the San Fernando Valley, Norwalk’s Green Line station and downtown’s Union Station.

To serve the hubs, the MTA would overhaul many of its bus routes, which some officials say are inefficient because they were developed over the last four decades with little regard to how they fit riders’ needs.

New routes would be of two varieties. The “spokes” would be short, many about four miles long, feeding commuters into the transit hubs. Longer routes, probably 10 to 20 miles long, would use dedicated bus lanes to funnel passengers quickly from hub to hub.

Officials plan to brief the MTA board of directors on the proposal within the next few months, although Catoe said the agency can change routes without board approval.

It could take more than a year to launch the plan and several more before the makeover is complete -- longer if there is significant opposition from MTA employee unions, bus riders or politicians.

The Bus Riders Union, lead plaintiff in the 1996 federal consent decree that established a 10-year mandate to improve bus service countywide, has yet to be briefed on the idea. But Cynthia Rojas, a spokeswoman for the group, said the organization would be opposed to the plan if it continued the MTA’s trend of offering fewer total hours of bus service. The agency cut about 3% of its bus service hours this year.

MTA officials said service hours might be reduced under the plan, but they contend that the system would result in faster, more frequent and user-friendly bus service.

With a mix of short and streamlined hub-to-hub trips, MTA buses theoretically would be on time more often. A key reason for delays is that buses meander over long routes through some of the busiest streets in the nation. The average MTA bus route now is 20 miles long; some run for 40 miles.

Eventual Construction

Although the MTA would initially start the hubs without building at their locations, it would seek to buy land and build. Eventually, Catoe said, the agency would create hubs with such amenities as bathrooms, phone booths and coffee shops, possibly even adding housing and offices.

Catoe said a key to the plan’s success would be the speed at which buses could travel between hubs. The MTA would seek to build bus-only express lanes to keep buses out of traffic between hubs, on many of the region’s busiest streets.

Such express lanes have been controversial in the past, largely because business leaders have complained that they eliminated vital parking space.

Catoe said he thought increasing the flow of traffic would more than offset any parking losses and would improve the local economy by making it easier to get around.

He expressed confidence that faster trips would attract “choice riders” -- people who drive cars and avoid public transportation -- to mass transit.

Despite rapid population growth, transit ridership in Los Angeles has been stagnant. For almost two decades, the county’s transit system, including municipal operators like Long Beach Transit, has been stuck at an average of 1.5 million weekday riders.

The system is used mostly by the poor, with median incomes for riders hovering in the range of $20,000 a year. The goal of the MTA’s plan, Catoe said, is to keep the base of working-class and poor riders, and add to it.

“We’ve got to beat our competition: the car,” he said.

A hub-and-spoke system might also have a big impact on trains.

Catoe said one of the plan’s goals would be to feed more commuters into the agency’s growing rail system, which will expand to 73 miles long later this month with the opening of the Pasadena-to-Los Angeles Gold Line. By placing some bus hubs at rail stations, planners believe they could better integrate the transit system, and save money by eliminating some bus routes.

Brian Taylor, director of UCLA’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said the plan is similar to systems created in Calgary and Quebec City, Canada, and similar to hub-and-spoke networks used by many airlines. He said research on transit systems using the hub-and-spoke model has shown there is a risk that people would be turned off by a system so reliant on transfers. Studies show that riders dislike being forced to transfer, even if trip times are cut.

“It can work,” he said, but “they have to be careful not to drive people away” because of the transfers.

The plan faces many other hurdles.

Pluses and Minuses

No estimates have been made on costs, though officials said switching to a hub-and-spoke plan would save money and maximize resources.

The agency may have to get the blessing of federal courts and labor unions. The courts are overseeing the MTA bus system until 2006, the result of a civil rights lawsuit that charged the agency with disregarding the needs of the poor and minorities by providing poor transit. The unions might balk at any service cuts that would endanger jobs.

The MTA would also need political backing. Many of the county’s most powerful politicians serve on the agency’s 13-member board of directors. So far that leadership knows little of the plan. Los Angeles Mayor and MTA board member James K. Hahn had not been briefed on it, said his transportation deputy, Brian Williams.

Few county supervisors knew many details. One who did, Supervisor Mike Antonovich, said he would stand solidly behind what he called a “bold and innovative move.”

Also uncertain is how the plan would be received by the municipal bus companies -- such as Long Beach Transit and Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus -- and the scores of other smaller transit providers that would be called on to help provide “spoke” service to the hubs, according to Catoe.

James Okazaki, assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, said he thought most of the county’s smaller transit agencies would welcome the plan, with a caveat.

“The concept is great and I think it’s something that could be a huge success ... but as with anything this big, there are going to be questions,” Okazaki said. He cautioned that any request by the MTA to have other agencies add service would probably be costly, requiring the MTA to funnel extra money to the smaller transit agencies.

Like Okazaki, transit expert Martin Wachs, a longtime MTA watcher and director of UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies, said the hub-and-spoke plan sounded promising.

“It’s a groundbreaking move for the MTA and I applaud their exploration of a new approach,” Wachs said. “The notion that you can give the bus an advantage is really very, very important. The only way you can get people to make a choice to use [the bus] is to give them speed ... and this is something that appears to have the chance to do it.”