fares – hikes, fareless

One of the more maddening parts of covering and discussing the mass transit system in Los Angeles is a fare structure that, quite honestly, doesn't make a lot of sense. Fares vary wildly depending on whether one is riding Metro or a local system. Transfers are rare among agencies, and difficult for new riders to figure out on Metro. If you have to transfer between buses, it can cost you more to go a mile with a couple of transfers than it would to go from North Hollywood to Long Beach via train.

Without some shocking turn of events, 48% of Metro passengers (seniors and students are exempted...this time) will see a fare increase this July.  For whatever reason, last Saturday's "Special Board Meeting" held at Metro's headquarters was sparely attended.  Perhaps because the hikes were viewed as inevitable, perhaps because the hearing was on a Saturday, or maybe because the "Special Board Meeting" was widely derided as a dog and pony show; but for whatever reason there wasn't as much energy at the Metro Board room to fight a fare increase as there was to celebrate trains a couple of hundred yards away. 

(Everyone knows that Dana is one of the Board members for the Southern California Transit Advocates, right?  Good. - DN)

Yesterday, the Bus Riders Union rallied in front of City Hall with representatives from CalPIRG, the Los Angeles County Bike Coalition, the National Resources Defense Council, the Clean Air Coalition and Transportation for America Campaign as part of a day of activism against fare increases and service cuts for transit agencies around the country.  Their event was mirrored in ten other cities around the country as activists nationwide spurred their legislators to provide relief to the nation's struggling transit agencies.  As you would expect, the BRU and their allies focused their fire at Metro's planned fare increases that are on deck for July and repeated their demand that the agency hold a new hearing on the hikes and the nearly 400,000 hours of service cuts.  Hearings on the changes were held years ago as part of a "fare restructuring" proposal that was supposed to raise the fares last year.  Those increases were delayed with the passage of Measure R.

As part of the compromise allowing Governor Schwarzenegger to eliminate the gas tax and replace with with an excise tax (ABX8 6 and ABX8 9), monies collected from the diesel tax are being used to partially replace the funds being removed from the State Transit Assistance Fund (STA). Despite the removal of the transit funding mechanisms in the gas tax, these bills ensure that transit operators have steady funding for operations by using the sales tax on diesel to replenish the State Transit Assistance Fund (STA).

Earlier this morning, the Bus Rider's Union rallied at the Wilshire/Western Transit Station to urge the Metro Board to not go forward with planned fare hikes for Metro bus and rail services until a full public hearing schedule is announced and executed. In May of 2007, the Metro Board adopted a motion to increase fares on July 1 of that year and again on July 1, 2009. As part of Measure R, the 2009 fare increase was postponed until this year. As a result, the BRU is pushing for an open hearing process, because by the day of the new fares, it will have been over three years since the last hearing on the hikes. From their press release:

In today's Los Angeles Times, the local paper of record follows up on this weekend's look at Metro's operational funding crisis with an editorial urging the Metro Board to increase fares to help close the agency's roughly quarter of a billion annual deficit for 2011.