Needed: a little driver’s ed

YOU CAN’T FAULT THE Metropolitan Transportation Authority for trying. In an effort to improve safety on the new Orange Line busway cutting across the San Fernando Valley, it has sent in traffic cops, slowed the buses to 10 mph as they pass through intersections, installed flashing lights on some coaches, considered a more attention-grabbing color scheme and added many new signs -- only to remove some of them when they were deemed too confusing.

One of the few things the MTA hasn’t tried is giving everyone in Los Angeles driving lessons. But lousy driving is the real reason for the six crashes involving cars and Orange Line buses in the six weeks the busway has been open. And all the bells and whistles in the world can’t compensate for drivers so lamebrained that they don’t notice the light is red and a massive silver bus with a strobe light on the front is creeping in their direction at the speed of a tortoise.

The Orange Line is the first busway -- a new street set aside only for buses -- in California, making it a closely watched experiment. If it works, one can expect more of them to appear, and not just in Los Angeles. That’s because they have all the speed and convenience of a light-rail line but at a fraction of the cost. Though buses don’t carry as many people as trains, busways make a lot of sense for lower-density corridors that don’t attract enough riders to justify the expense of light rail.

The interest in the Orange Line helps explain why every time there is an accident, it ends up in the news. But the busway doesn’t appear to be more dangerous than any other bus route in the city. Metro buses get in about 3.5 accidents for every 100,000 miles driven. Orange Line buses have been involved in six accidents after driving 160,000 miles, just a bit of ahead of the average. And in every case the bus driver was not at fault, a record unmatched in the rest of the fleet.

The MTA is rightly taking strong measures to improve safety. But there’s only so much a public agency can be expected to do to protect people from themselves. Some of the measures being floated, such as railroad-crossing-style gates at intersections, would hopelessly snarl traffic on key Valley arteries and badly stall the buses.

The safety lessons being learned now on the Orange Line should be applied when and if new busways are built. But the handful of accidents, in every case involving drivers who ran red lights, should by no means discourage transit planners from looking at new locations for busways.