MTA Strike Puts Traffic Officers in Thick of It

Armed only with a repertoire of finger-pointing, hand-waving and arm-winding, Traffic Officer Freddie Nuno strode into the the intersection of Hill Street and Olympic Boulevard. With the rush-hour traffic threatening to gridlock because of the transit strike, Nuno planted his feet, looked to his left, looked to his right and raised his arms high.

Engines revved, horns honked and a disgruntled driver leaned out the window to offer a rude assessment of the situation. But no one disobeyed the rookie officer’s pantomimed orders.

“We’re just trying to maintain some civility on the streets,” Nuno said with a chuckle. “If they’re going to have to wait, they’ll just have to wait.”

As the city’s buses and trains collected a second week of dust during the Metropolitan Transportation Authority mechanics strike, traffic on Los Angeles streets has risen significantly. Heeding their call to duty, traffic officers have shifted their focus from writing parking tickets to spending more time controlling traffic at intersections throughout the city.

“I normally write 35 or 40 parking citations” each day, said Kenny Frazier, at Figueroa and 3rd streets. “It’s been half that since the strike.”

Frazier’s supervisor, Capt. Darryl Roberson, said that overall his downtown squad is writing about 20% fewer tickets since the strike began.

Morning crews that usually do little or no traffic control spend the first three hours of each shift clearing rush-hour traffic. Night teams begin directing traffic about 4 p.m. and sometimes keep going until after 7 p.m.

Traffic officers expressed pride in helping to keep traffic flowing, suggesting that being in the intersection is more exciting than reading meters.

“Drivers get to see another side of us,” Officer Kim Ellis said. “They get to see that we’re not just here to take their money, but here to help as well.”

Officers acknowledged that the level of abuse from frustrated commuters has risen during the strike, but said that they know better than to take the insults personally.

“Some guy shouted at me, ‘You’re screwing up the streets.’ Another told me, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ ” said Officer Sedrick Moore, a 13-year veteran, before putting himself back in the middle of 3rd Street and Beaudry Avenue to manage a steady flow of morning commuters. “This traffic can be a nightmare. I sympathize.”

The strike has certainly afforded officers the opportunity to practice their techniques and refine their individual styles of stopping traffic with nothing more than eye contact and two hands. They excitedly infuse conversations with trade jargon such as “lane sweeping,” “pulling traffic” and “street flushing.”

There was a time, before the advent of traffic lights in the 1920s, when traffic officers were the only guard against total automobile chaos, said Jimmy Price, chief of traffic control operations for the city’s Department of Transportation.

But with traffic signals, improved city planning and computers that monitor traffic patterns, officers today play more of a supporting role.

But the traffic officers know that the strike will be settled and both traffic and their daily routine will return to normal. Price, however, does not worry about the future: “We’re always going to need a guy to go out there and say, ‘Hold on a second.’ ”