Buses

(Thanks to Sunyoung Yang at the Bus Riders Union, Bart Reed with the Transit Coalition, and Ray Klein with the Brentwood Community Council for help researching this article.  Also, The Source had a review of the meeting up yesterday for more background.)

If you've ridden a Metro bus in Greater Los Angeles, you've seen them.  Those weird tv's which either seem to be stuck at a blasting volume or completely muted, playing a mix of mind numbing trivia, local public interest news, or advertisements.  Purchasing some time on TransitTV is a pretty cost effective way to get out a message, when you consider that 2 million people ride Metro buses every day.  But most Metro riders find the televisions to be a waste of space at best, noise pollution at worst.

USDOT Deputy Secretary John Porcari kicked off the Transportation Equity Network’s “One Nation, Indivisible” conference yesterday with a call to think long-term. By 2050, he said, we can expect the U.S. population to grow by 100 million people, and nearly all of them will live in large urban centers. Problems like crumbling infrastructure, inadequate transit systems, grinding traffic and pollution will be much worse then if we don’t start acting today.

Earlier today, the Metro Board of Directors approved a motion cutting 305,000 bus service hours in a surprisingly close 7-6 vote. In addition to the expected opposition from bus riders, concerns about the cuts were raised about what "replacement" buses will be created for areas where rapid buses will be cut and the total impact on the bus system of the cumulative cuts of the past several years.   Most of the cuts will go into place in June, with a handful coming after the opening of Phase I of the Expo Line.

This week the Bus Riders Union has been touting a decision by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA) to conduct an "on-site compliance review" of whether or not Metro is complying with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act with its plans to cut transit service this Spring.  A full copy of the letter from the FTA can be downloaded, here.

Last year Culver CityBus briefly stopped running its buses onto the campus of West Los Angeles College as Culver City Vice Mayor Micheál O‘Leary noted at the August 2, 2010 City Council meeting "with the understanding that the College would be providing service from the street into the College. ... since the College failed to keep that commitment the City saw the need to resume the service again and to also resume discussions with the College regarding the issue." Ari Noonan in his recent article "Almost with a Smile, West Accepts Bus Sked Compromise. Residents Don’t" delves into the actions of former West L.A. College President Mark Rocha that resulted in the brief removal of service.

Bill Lind is a big man. The director of the Center for Public Transportation at American Conservative stands well over six feet tall, and when he really gets going, he seems to loom even larger. Maybe that’s why he hates buses so much. “Those seats designed for garden gnomes,” he said.