The Few, The Proud, The Bus Riders

By Steve Lopez/Los Angeles

I ride the bus in Los Angeles.

The way I saw it, L.A. didn't need one more guy sitting in an idling car. But this confession, I've found, can stop conversations cold. It's not quite the impact you'd get from saying, "By the way, I murdered six people this morning, and, boy, am I hungry." But people generally respond as if you've said you ride a dinosaur to the office.

One reason is that trains and buses are shunned by 97% of all L.A. County commuters, and otherwise likable people will actually tell you that what you drive is who you are. Another is that while the Santa Monica buses I ride into Los Angeles are no bargain, Los Angeles might just have the most inept public-transit system on the planet earth.

Nearly 20 years ago, noticing that all vehicles had come to a complete stop and that the sky was gone, it dawned on city fathers that other cities have mass-transit systems--much like the one that was ripped up here 50 years ago in what some call a conspiracy among auto, oil and tire moguls. So 12 years ago, with an increase in sales taxes and trainloads of federal cash, they began to build a rail system for the ages.

The result? The neglected bus system, which still handles 91% of all transit riders, is now roughly as efficient as travel by burro. Decrepit buses break down, air conditioners don't work and drivers blow past waiting passengers when they can't squeeze another one aboard. Fed-up bus patrons, mostly students and low-income laborers and house cleaners, have begun chanting "No seat, no fare!" as they rally their brethren to rebellion on rolling sardine cans.

The rail system, on the other hand, is one of the wonders of the world. After years of cost overruns and delays, $7 billion worth of debt, a Hollywood Boulevard cave-in, constant second-guessing of the entire project and incessant bickering along racial and political lines, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has a partly completed commuter railroad that moves fewer people than Disneyland's Monorail and cost $262 million per mile.

They'd have been better off with a good fleet of rickshas.

It would take years to finish what was promised, but most construction is now on hold while MTA wizards put their heads together, in the nearly half-billion-dollar, 25-story temple they built themselves in 1995 despite abundant vacancies in downtown offices, and consider the obvious. The answer, all along, was buses. A scaled-down rail system and lots more buses.

"The project was flawed from the beginning," admits mayor and MTA board chief Richard Riordan. That's because people and jobs are spread too far and wide to be served by a fixed-rail system. "When I come out of my house in Brentwood, I can go in 40 different directions," he says.

But most of the federal money was tagged for rail, and when you dangle a pinata that fat before a public agency, no one misses the fiesta. Politicians, contractors, bankers, underwriters, lobbyists and other wildlife wore party hats for years.

This is the history that has turned Mari Aguirre, 38, a mild-mannered house cleaner and baby-sitter, into a revolutionary. Aguirre and other members of the Bus Riders Union are boarding buses and urging passengers not to pay the $1.35 fare. Aguirre and her son sometimes wait an hour for a bus after his nighttime karate class, and she fears for their lives on the mean streets.

"No, no, no, you don't have to pay," Aguirre told passengers exhaling their way onto a jammed bus on Sixth Street. At each stop, she shooed passengers past the fare box. Smiling riders found that most bus drivers either supported the campaign or had nothing to say about it. "We want 1,600 new buses," Aguirre went on in English and Spanish. On a good day, the MTA has 1,800 buses on the street, 800 fewer than in the mid-'80s. Hundreds are on order, but given the epic bungling, Riordan said it will take years to provide the kind of service capable of relieving traffic. And even then, they might need the Jaws of Life to get Angelenos out of their cars.

So let them sit in them. Whether it's L.A. or Santa Monica, we bus riders are never happier than when we're enjoying, say, a weekly magazine while six blocks of cars are hopelessly trapped behind our lumbering bow.

No seat, no fare.

The few, the proud.

I ride the bus in Los Angeles.