I don't know how many of you may think I came off harsh, but this is the published part of an interview I gave to LA City Beat Wednesday, Jan. 30 in the late afternoon. You can see the service cuts in the images attached. I've attached the Richard Stanger
fare gate analysis for those that haven't seen it.
San Fernando Valley
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San Gabriel Valley
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Southbay
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Westside / Central
Full SizeLA City Beat: Thursday, January 31, 2008Bart Reed
The Transit Coalition founder on his fight to save 25 bus routes
When Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that he wanted to axe Metro's 25 worst performing bus routes, it sent Bart Reed into overdrive.
Reed, executive director of transportation-minded non-profit The Transit Coalition, founded the group in 2001 to push for those elusive "regional transit solutions" that everyone's always talking about. Pulling together politicians, academics, business interests, and activists throughout L.A. County – and beyond – Reed has been pushing for improvements in the interplay between Metrolink, Metro, the Orange County Transit Authority, and the myriad other players in the Southern California public transit game.
So it was with much chagrin that he heard Villaraigosa's call to cut bus service. Some of the lines on the guillotine, Reed says, are the only routes that connect the San Fernando Valley's blue collar workers to jobs, its students to community colleges, its families to hospitals, and all of the above to regional rail connections. Just after a meeting with Valley business leaders on the potential of service cuts he calls "draconian insanity," Reed spoke with CityBeat to dismantle Metro's spin, argue that rail turnstiles won't ever pay for themselves, and get in a few shots at departing County Supervisor and Metro board member Yvonne Burke.
–Greg Katz
CityBeat: What bus lines are up for elimination and why should we worry about it?
Bart Reed: The Metro staff has ordered that 200,000 hours worth of bus service be cut. This is being instigated by the mayor, who wants to cut the 25 worst-performing bus routes in the Metro system.
The bottom performers at Metro aren't necessarily bad routes when they're looked at as if they were run by Big Blue Bus, City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation, Santa Clarita Transit, Glendale Beeline, or one of the other municipal operators. They help senior citizens get to the doctor, they help students get to school, they help workers get to jobs. Strategically, if you start to excise them, you're left with big gaps in the bus system and it hurts the community's mobility.
There's a lot of duplicity and mistruth coming from Metro. One specific example of a proposed cut where the lies are bigger than reality is a bus route on a street called Hubbard in San Fernando and Sylmar. The bus essentially connects a whole bunch of bus service with the Sylmar Metrolink station and it shuttles people up to Mission College and also to connect with other bus routes on streets like Glen Oaks, Borden, Foothill, and the college. It's a brand new bus route that was created about a year ago, and it's been accepted by the community.
The community ends up with a lot less service, because [Metro reported that] it "duplicates other service." Well, in two and a half miles, for a quarter of a mile it duplicates some other service because if you're coming out of a train station, and going on the radiating streets out, it shares the same street with two other bus routes. This one goes a couple miles north to the college – a direct connection to the college. But they put in their [report], "Duplicates other service." The politicians who don't know how to read see "duplicates" and say, "We've got to get rid of duplicates!"
The gaps just become profound. I spoke to some business leaders in the northeast Valley at lunch today, and they're all aghast at what's going on, because people aren't going to have a way to get to jobs. It's going to hurt the people who are really the working poor, the people that are below the poverty lines.
How does Metro make these cuts without getting an earful from bus riders?
There's sort of an insidious way that MTA has set up the bus service oversight and delivery. It used to be that the Metro board itself ultimately had to rule on the changes in bus service. But MTA has put in another level of government called the sector governance councils. The SGCs were supposed to have some level of autonomy, but what ends up actually happening is: The bus cuts come before the SGC, and they're told, "Either accept these cuts or we'll cut something else." Instead of saying, "Hey, this is wrong, we shouldn't be cutting the service," it's the local people who are forced to do the draconian cuts, and then it doesn't really filter upward to the county supervisors. They don't feel the pain. The mayor doesn't feel the pain. The other appointees don't feel the pain. They've insulated themselves from the pain of the consumers.
How does the addition of turnstiles to the rail system play into this?
There's a canard that goes around by some of the supervisors. Most of the riders of the Metro bus and Metro rail system have monthly passes or they buy day passes. When you get on the train, there's nobody to show your pass to, so you keep it in your pocket. Then there's these other people who aren't regular riders, who get this perception that nobody paid, because they're looking at the minorities who ride the trains and the buses … and they don't see anybody showing passes.
What happens is, there's people like Yvonne Burke – whose sparkling record is that she cheats, too; she didn't live in her district for a long time, and now that she's leaving office, she doesn't have anybody going after her, criminally, to force her to live in her district – saying, "Oh, all these people are cheating. We need to put gates in."
The companies that put the gates in – that's $150 million installation, or something of that nature. To avoid Metro taking a heavy hit on putting out that capital, there's a contract where they're going to lease the gates to Metro. When you lease something rather than buying out capital-wise, you end up paying a lot more money, because the lease guys, not only are they making money on the capital, but they're also making money financing the lease over 10, 20, 30 years.
Then [Metro] came up with a number, something like $5.5 million
in fare cheating. If you pick through the numbers, you find that they're really only losing $2.2 million in fares, not $5 million.
If you're putting in a system that requires attendants – you go to New York, or you go to San Francisco to the BART system – every station has two employees working three shifts, seven days a week. Metro's got 10 or 20 stations that would be eligible for employees to service the stations. You're talking about putting in employees somewhere at the basis of $10, $20, $30 million a year in new employees.
They're trying to minimize how they're going to have the attendants. They say, "If there's an attendant … [it will be for] every five stations." Can you imagine a guy with a wheelchair sitting there at the turnstiles because the attendant has a 10 or 15 minute trip to get there?
This whole thing is a cruel draconian trick upon the powerless bus riders and the transit system users and it's totally insulated by a Metro board that doesn't know how to do the math. [They plan to] waste more public funds in perpetuity on contractors that don't tell the truth on their reports to the board.
One of the board members, Richard Katz, to his credit, knows that something is wrong here. But then you have the hysteria from the Yvonne Burke.
Do you think the board would have a better understanding of transit if they rode it more?
The politicians, because they don't use the system, they don't understand what kind of draconian inconveniences they're foisting upon the public. They just don't have the vision. It's nice to know the mayor rode the bus yesterday or something like that, but he doesn't ride it every day, and he doesn't really understand how it is in other cities, how many employees are there, what kind of staffing you need.
The actions by the board are going to make the system extremely user unfriendly. They try to justify it by saying they're going to put bomb-sniffing facilities in the fare gates. But you can put the bomb-sniffing and all the other high-tech stuff into the barrier-free system. The big lie has been pushed and forced upon [us] by Burke … and it's real unfortunate. The public is the one that lives this, our employees that need to get to jobs in San Fernando, Sylmar, Pacoima, other parts of the San Fernando Valley, so they can pay for a fare attendant to collect no money.
