Working Mom Gets On and Off Commuter Bus

It really seemed like the right thing to do.

My husband’s car had broken down, and we decided that, instead of replacing it, we would try to make do with one vehicle.

Public transportation, though a little cumbersome, is available in Studio City where we live, and by dumping the second car in favor of the bus and rail lines we would save a good $500 or $600 per month, once we counted car payments, insurance, maintenance and gasoline.

Moreover, considering that my job is to write about transportation issues, I figured I ought to be out there on the buses, meeting people and seeing firsthand what the system was like.

So we gave our 1995 Ford Contour to one of those car donation charities, and kept a 2002 Honda Odyssey to haul our kids around. Generally, we agreed, I would take public transportation since I work downtown and it’s easier to get there from where we live than to Glendale, where my husband has an office.

We’d trade if I had something to do that required a car, or I’d drop him off and he would wend his way back home on public transit. If we both needed cars, we’d rent one for a day or two, figuring that the cost of even a few days’ rental each month wouldn’t approach the money we saved by forgoing the second car.

Except for our income, which is higher than the $12,000 median, we were not unusual among bus riders.

Like us, many of the half-million Los Angeles County residents who regularly use the bus system are a little bit either side of 40 years old (39.6 years is the median), and own a car, which one member of the family uses to go to work, leaving the others to use the bus.

“The bus system is a lot of people’s second car,” said Jesse Simon, market research manager for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

Some people thought we were nuts. Our neighbor across the street offered to give me rides whenever he saw me heading to the bus stop.

But I really liked it.

Each morning and evening, instead of wilting in traffic, I sat on the subway, free of the stress of driving. I traded phone numbers with a mother whose children were near mine in age. I met a retired opera singer who lives in my neighborhood. I read a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

More than that, though, I felt connected with the city in a way that I had not before. In an odd way, I felt more empowered, not less, because I could just walk out of my house and hop a bus to go somewhere. I could get off wherever I wanted, without worrying about parking. I didn’t have to wonder if someone would hit me as I tried to make a turn. I never had to find a gas station.

If I were riding along and saw a shop or cafe that I liked, I could just hop off, check it out, and hop back on again. My monthly pass, which was subsidized by The Times, meant I didn’t even need to carry cash.

A source of mine, a public relations man named Byron Tucker, said he had been taking the Metrolink from Van Nuys to downtown three or four days a week. He liked it because he got to read the paper on the way, and he arrived at work invigorated after the short walk from the train station to his office.

For us, however, trying to make it on one car, some tensions quickly surfaced.

For the first several weeks after we gave up the Ford, Morris, my husband, insisted on driving me to the Red Line at the Universal City station, and picking me up there in the evenings.

Unfortunately, however, this disrupted his work schedule, pushing his work day back by two hours or more as he waited with me for kids to go to school and the baby-sitter to arrive.

After a while, we gave this up. Instead, I walked to the end of our block to pick up one of the DASH shuttles run by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Though it was often late, it was clean and nice, and deposited me at the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura boulevards, where I caught the Metro Rapid bus to the Red Line station at Universal.

It took an hour to get downtown on days when the DASH came right away, and about an hour and 20 minutes when it was late. It was longer than the 50 minutes required to drive and park downtown, but that didn’t bother me so much.

The biggest problem was in the evening, because the DASH in my neighborhood stops running at 5:30 p.m., far too early for me.

So at night I had to either walk the mile and a quarter home from the Metro Rapid stop or have my husband pick me up.

We have four children, two of whom have medical needs that require frequent doctors’ appointments and constant bird-dogging of issues at school. So if one of us went to a school meeting or physician’s office, the other had to work from home.

I could no longer run out to the grocery store before work, because what had been a 20-minute trip to the supermarket became an hour or more as I waited for the bus, rode to the store, shopped and rode home.

There were other problems too. One day, as I was getting off the train at Universal a man suddenly appeared on my right, carrying a heavy duffel. He asked me the time. I told him, and kept walking. A moment later, he appeared again, this time on my left. He asked me the time again.

I felt scared and walked quickly ahead. My husband was waiting outside the station with our 2-year-old in the car. I ran to them, fighting back visions of what might happen if the guy attacked me in front of the baby.

Despite the frustrations, we stuck with it.

Then, in October, MTA mechanics went on strike, shutting down the system for five weeks.

After a week of trying to share a car, we decided to rent one. We figured the strike would end soon, and that we could rent a car even for a whole week and still come out ahead of what it used to cost when we had two cars.

Wrong. By the time the strike ended, we had spent more than $600 on the rental.

That changed the fundamental equation in a way I hadn’t expected. Whereas before, we hadn’t minded renting a car on those difficult days when we knew we’d really need one, now we resisted doing so. As a result, I was frequently late for work. My husband got grouchy about having to share the car or come home early. We had to cancel some of the kids’ medical appointments.

So when the credit union offered a sale on auto-finance rates at the end of the year, we took advantage of it and bought a second-hand Accord.

According to Simon of the MTA, the frustrations that ended our one-car experiment are exactly the ones that plague other would-be bus riders.

The three major impediments to using the system, Simon said, are travel time, frequency of service and accommodating unusual work hours. “You,” he said to me last week, “were affected by all three of the major impediments.”

I drove the new car downtown last week for the first time. I felt nimbler than I had in months, zipping to the pharmacy and to Trader Joe’s in the morning before work last Monday, sliding into my desk at 9:15 a.m. and filing a story an hour later.

But I felt wistful too. I felt isolated and bored in the car on the commute home.

I want to keep using transit at least some of the time. But if last week is any indicator, it will be hard to do. Heading out of the house each day, I think of the three trips it takes just to get downtown. I think of how the DASH stops running before I even leave the office. I think of what will happen if there’s an emergency and I need to get home quickly.

And I take the car.

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If you have a question, gripe or story idea about driving in Southern California write to Behind the Wheel c/o Los Angeles Times, 202 W. 1st St., Los Angeles, CA 90012, or send an e-mail to behindthewheel@latimes.com.