MTA Update: Buses, rails back strike-hit Los Angeles

CALIFORNIA: Buses, rails back strike-hit Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES - Buses rolled Wednesday (Oct. 18) for the first time in 4 1/2 weeks as drivers came back to work from a transit strike that cut daily service to 450,000 people, according to the Associated Press.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority fielded about two-thirds of its usual weekday fleet of 2,000 buses serving 18,500 bus stops.

Full bus and subway service was expected today (Oct. 19).

MTA offered free rides for five days to its riders, many of them low-income workers dependent on public transportation.

Some 4,300 bus and rail operators of the United Transportation Union walked out Sept. 16 after months of stalemate over a new contract. Mechanics and clerks went out with the drivers.

The new contract, which provides raises of 9.3 percent over three years, was ratified late Tuesday.

CALIFORNIA: Relieved Riders Climb Back on Buses

LOS ANGELES - Out of the pearly morning fog they barreled down city streets, like knights in shining armor, like the cavalry--the buses of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority were back, according to the Los Angeles Times.

After enduring a 32-day strike that forced bus riders to walk, scramble for car rides or pay expensive cab fares, the arrival of the buses--giving free rides, no less--was practically a religious experience.

"Oh, praise the Lord!" said Norma Spearman, 61, boarding a bus headed eastbound on Venice Boulevard. At first she had resented the striking bus drivers. "But then I said, 'What would I do?' Ever since then, I've been praying and walking," she said.

Riders mostly greeted returning drivers with smiles and feelings of relief. The 450,000 MTA users stranded by the strike got their buses back before dawn Wednesday and the first subway train carrying passengers rolled out of Union Station at 3:55 p.m.

Some buses were jammed to the doors. Others were nearly deserted. Ridership was at a five-year high before the strike, partially because of high gas prices and service improvements.

Returning riders got a thank-you gift from the MTA on fare boxes: signs in English and Spanish proclaiming, "Welcome Back! Free Fare through October 22, 2000."

In addition to the free service through Sunday, September bus passes will be honored through the end of October.

MTA estimates 75% of subway and light rail service will be restored today. Drivers have been given 72 hours to return to work, so it may take that long for all vehicles to be running again.

But vendors already were benefiting from the restored service. Juan Jose Basquez, whose catering truck has served bus commuters at the intersection of Topanga Canyon and Ventura boulevards for 18 years, said he experienced a 50% drop in earnings during the strike.

"Before the strike, I made $700 a day, and when nobody came to the bus stop, it was $350 a day," he said. Business seemed to be better Wednesday morning, as dozens of commuters bought hot coffee and muffins.

Riders alternated between sympathy for and annoyance at the bus drivers.

Waiting for the bus in front of the Cafe Tropical, a coffeehouse in Silver Lake, Jeff Moffett and roommate Kris Knight argued about which side was to blame. Moffett, 31, who works for a brokerage firm, said the drivers weren't at fault. "They have to make a living," he said.

Knight, 29, an aspiring actor who works as a waiter, said he was angry at the drivers. "I can't forgive them for what they did," Knight said.

He wasn't alone.

"I'm still angry at the drivers because they went on strike and left us hanging," said Juliana Griffin, 21, who juggles classes at West Los Angeles College with her job in Marina del Rey. She didn't spare management either. "I think the MTA has lots more work to do to make customers feel more comfortable. The MTA has to do more to make customers want to ride. They need to lower fares and find a way to better control some passengers."

Her sentiments weren't much different from those of Eric Mann, the leader of the Bus Riders Union. The union is demanding that the MTA make improvements but not raise rates.

Drivers themselves are returning to work with mixed feelings. Leonard Jefferson, a bus driver for 19 years, said the new contract isn't good enough for all drivers. He wasn't surprised, however, that union members went along.

"They didn't vote to accept the contract," said Jefferson. "They voted to get back to work and try to catch up on their bills."

First-day-back buses drew a varied ridership, including Mayor Richard Riordan, in suit and tie, getting a ceremonial lift to his restaurant, the Original Pantry Cafe. The mayor showed up for his bus ride the way a celebrity shows up for a first-class plane flight. Ferried to the Cypress Park depot in a red SUV, he hopped on the waiting bus with his security guard at 5:50 a.m., and bus driver Betty James immediately took off. His presence turned the bus into a traveling media show. Bleary-eyed riders waiting in the dark morning, content simply to have a bus pull up to the stop, were startled to find themselves being glad-handed by the mayor and bathed in the lights of TV cameras.

"I didn't know what was going on when I got on the bus," said rider Esther Ramos, 17. "But it was nice meeting the mayor."

Most buses weren't so celebrity- and media-filled. Across the city, it was the usual mix of office workers, students, gang members ("My street name is Mr. Whisper") and the elderly.

Some buses were late. And although bus riders often develop the patience of yoga devotees, having to wait Wednesday morning--after a month's strike--proved irritating.

David Casteneda waited--45 minutes, he said--to catch a bus on Venice Boulevard to his job at a downtown dental lab. Casteneda, 35, said he was chronically late during the strike and sometimes absent. Often he walked an hour and 20 minutes. His bosses were understanding. "They said yesterday, 'With the buses running, maybe you'll be on time,' " he said.

But after checking the street, yet again, for sign of his bus, he said, "Sometimes you feel like you want to move to another state."

When the bus finally arrived, Casteneda wedged himself onto a step in the back doorway. Steven Sanker, a 17-year-old student, tried to stand behind him but the doors wouldn't stay closed. So Sanker hopped off, and the bus rolled on.

Sanker's 1990 Mustang was in the shop. "Every day people pushing you, every day buses passing you by," he said. "That's why I got my car."

Surprisingly, another bus appeared--with plenty of seats.

Driver Cecilia Green welcomed him aboard. "People were happy to see us," said Green, 36.

On Green's earlier morning run west to the beach, her bus was so jammed with riders that a few little fights broke out, she said. But Green doesn't mind. "I'm glad to be back. These are my people. They pay my salary."

Some marooned bus riders found that the strike had given them an unexpected benefit: exercise. Danielle Porter, 18, said the half-hour walk from her Ladera Heights home to West Los Angeles College got her in great shape. "But it was not by design," she said. On Wednesday, she rode the bus.

CALIFORNIA: Strike that nobody noticed hit 450,000 transit riders hard

LOS ANGELES - Most people in Los Angeles, it would seem, could afford to dismiss the strike by Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus drivers and train operators as a mere irritant, an annoyance, according to the Los Angeles Times.

There were complaints of more sluggish freeway commutes, of domestic help gone missing, but not much more. The big city transit strike that nobody noticed--this would be the story line most commonly attached to the 32-day shutdown of the nation's second largest bus system.

A much different analysis could be mined early Wednesday morning along the MTA's Line 720, one of the system's new "Metro Rapid" routes. The line runs from Montebello to Santa Monica, straight through the midsection of the city, and with a daily ridership of 50,000 it constitutes the MTA's busiest route.

For the people who boarded the red-and-white buses in the soupy darkness before sunup, the strike had been something beyond a municipal oddity, something more than merely irritating. The stories they told were of lost jobs and long walks to work, of dropped classes and savings sunk into rental cars, of one hard month.

"A lot of people like me have to use the bus," explained Sandra Flores, a 20-year-old who was riding from her family home in downtown to UCLA, where she works as a teacher's assistant in an elementary school program. "It made a big difference for us. I guess for people who had cars the strike wasn't a big deal. For us, it was."

After work each day, Flores takes night courses at Santa Monica College and then rides the bus back downtown. She doesn't own a car, doesn't possess a driver's license. Her parents don't own a car. She and her family, she said, have traveled by bus "forever." She punctuated this bit of personal history with a shrug; it certainly didn't strike her as odd.

The strike added a couple of hours to her commute both ways, and forced her to drop a Saturday class. Still, she considered herself fortunate. With some difficulty, she managed to cobble together a commute on various Santa Monica bus lines. Her mother, a janitor in Redondo Beach, had it tougher. During the strike, she was forced to walk a couple of dozen blocks through the middle of the city at around 3 every morning, after a company van dropped her off from her job. Why the van could not place her any closer to home was not clear.

The demographics along the 720 Line seemed to change from neighborhood to neighborhood, as did the curbside signage. In the course of an hour and a few minutes, one bus would pass by El Paso Shoes and Casa Olympica and the Better Life Organics warehouse and the Fred Jordan Mission and strip malls marked with signs written in Korean and, farther west, the Symbolic Motor Car Co. and L.A. Tanning and Marble World, ending a block from the beach. It was, as has been noted, a bus ride across Los Angeles, in all senses of the phrase.

On the Eastside, many of the men wore workingmen's attire and carried their lunches in white plastic sacks; their heads would bob in sleep as the bus hurtled along Whittier Boulevard toward downtown. A 31-year-old man named Ernest Ortiz was dressed in a red jacket that identified him as an employee of Five-Star Parking. He picked through a young reader's biography of Vincent van Gogh, pausing to say that his strike strategy had been to bunk with friends nearer to his downtown valet job.

There were riders in nursing uniforms, and mothers with school-age daughters. There were security guards and old-timers who hobbled aboard with canes. Going back from west to east, the passenger list would include a couple of suits; they tended to keep their heads buried deep in the morning newspaper.

Each rider was greeted with a yellow sign on the toll box that announced, in English and Spanish: "Welcome Back! Free Fare Today." In general, most seemed remarkably stoic about the past month. The riders tended to side with the drivers, and there was talk of "bigwigs" and MTA mismanagement and "politics." Some gave their names; others refused. Some tried mightily to find common lines of communication between their night school English and their questioner's high school Spanish.

When pressed, a few quietly recorded personal losses. From a federal government employee: "I was late every day to work, every day." From a hospital worker, named Shaneka Holliman: "Let's see. The first rental car was about $500." From two overnight clerks at a Santa Monica Rite Aid, both of whom asked to be identified only as L.J.:

"We walked!"

How far?

"A long way," said L.J. No. 1.

"About an hour each way," added L.J. No. 2.

Many told stories of others: an 85-year-old who couldn't make a medical appointment; downtown pensioners who couldn't "get to their checks" and took to panhandling in the elevators of their residential hotels.

The most frequently advanced line of political analysis coming out of the strike had it that bus riders like these were too low in place, and too small in numbers, to force a more rapid resolution of the stalemate.

As William Fulton, an author and urban planning expert, put it in an interview: "If you are going to go on strike, you have got to inconvenience the people responsible for resolving the strike."

That view was summed up most succinctly in a headline in the Oct. 8 L.A. Times: "Why Aren't Buses Missed? Simple: Everybody Drives."

Another possible explanation, though, involves the scale of the metropolis, and its ability to hide entire cultures, entire citizenships, within its ever-expanding borders.

Los Angeles is so vast it can absorb things that might paralyze other cities. Olympics, national political conventions--they can come and go without disrupting the general populace a whit. And thus, maybe, it also was big enough to absorb without too many kinks in the day-to-day patterns a month long, citywide bus strike. This does not necessarily validate the assumption that "everybody" drives in Los Angeles.

In fact, the corridor from Montebello to Santa Monica--taking into account the No. 720 lines and the other, non-express lines that traverse it--is believed by transportation experts in the city to be the busiest bus corridor in the nation.

In fact, the MTA's daily ridership of roughly 450,000 exceeds the entire population of Sacramento and nearly matches the general populaces of Long Beach, Tucson and New Orleans. It's only when pitted against the entire sweep of Los Angeles that this overlooked citydom of bus riders seems to fade to insignificance. The hundreds of thousands of individual riders, of course, do not tend to traffic in such macro-views. They simply board, when they can, and ride.

The population of bus riders in the near term was diminished on the first day back from the strike. Riders midway through the route marveled at being able to find open seats. At least one rider said that, as a result of the strike, his L.A. bus days were finished.

"I lost my job," said 50-year-old Frank Johnson of Culver City. For a couple of days, he had managed to hitchhike to his work as a chef's assistant at an advertising firm's cafeteria. He couldn't stick with it, however, and eventually received formal notice that he had "abandoned" his $10.30-an-hour job and, therefore, was dismissed.

He was on his way to a public storage facility near downtown. He wanted to pick up a few things before leaving town the next day. The Compton native had read in the classified ad section that there was plenty of work for kitchen hands in Las Vegas.

How are you going to get there, Frank? he was asked.

"Going Greyhound," he said.

WASHINGTON: Statement of U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater concerning the settlement of the Los Angeles transit strike

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The following is a statement from U.S. Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater concerning the settlement of the Los Angeles transit strike:

I applaud the efforts and commitment demonstrated tonight by the United Transportation Union and the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority in approving the contract between the UTU and the Authority and ending this month-long transit strike.

The half-million people who use transit every day in Los Angeles will again be able to depend on the buses, light rail and subway to get them to work, school, worship, shopping and home.

A special thanks is due to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Gov. Grey Davis and his staff and the members of the California legislature who brought and kept the parties together while they worked to achieve an equitable and fair agreement. As I often say, transportation is the tie that binds and having this important transportation link once again operational is very important to the people of Los Angeles.

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