Buses

(Not sure what the My Figueroa project is?  Check out this story from last year?)

The Federal Transit Administration seems pleased with the progress being made by Metro to change the way it does business to be in compliance with federal civil rights statutes.  Rather than requiring major changes to the way Metro does business, the FTA seems content with changes to its outreach and reporting methods.  The FTA began a Civil Rights Title VI review of Metro last year after complaints from the Bus Riders Union and other civil rights and transit advocacy groups.  These groups hoped the FTA would reverse the over 1 million hours of cuts to bus service that Metro has ordered since the end of a judicial consent decree mandating increases in service expired in 2008.

As Damien has noted previously new bus benches are popping up around Los Angeles as new bench provider Martin Outdoor gets up to speed following the city council awarding the contract in August 2011.

You may have noticed all the hullabaloo Metro made in January 2011 about retiring the last diesel buses in its fleet. Metro even gave the final bus a new paint job before it was ceremoniously towed away at the press event. Actually this was a bit mis-leading because some of the contractors that run selected Metro routes were at that time still using diesel buses in some cases, purchased for them by Metro. I believe even those buses have now been retired.

At the end of last year, the emails started trickling in.  "There's a new bench at my stop."  "They replaced the crappy plastic bench with something more durable.  Yes, after months of witnessing the dismantleing of the old network of bus benches after the City Council voted to replace their old bench contractor Norman Bench with Martin Outdoor Media.

Yesterday, the Metro Board of Directors discussed the recently released FTA Report detailing Title VI Civil Rights violations at Metro.  The Source called the discussion "by far the liveliest part of the meeting," but it also showed ongoing confusion about what the report means and what is the best way to meet the complaints.

Yesterday, the Federal Transit Administration publicly released its Title VI Civil Rights Review of Metro that was completed earlier this year.  The FTA outlines a series of deficiencies in almost half of its twelve civil rights categories.  Metro insists these are minor issues that can be easily fixed while critics of the agency call the report "a crushing indictment of the MTA."  The document is available as a word document off the FTA's website and a pdf off Streetsblog's Sribd Page.

On Friday, Metro abruptly announced that it would be suspending changes and cuts to its bus service originally planned to go into effect yesterday until further notice.  The about-face on the most recent round of proposed cuts and other changes happened so quickly that just the day before Metro announced the changes via press release and it didn't have time to forewarn members of its local Service Councils that approved the service tweaks of the change in plans.