Night Owl

I (the Steve) helped Ted Nguyen at OCTA out with some photographs from the California High Speed Rail Los Angeles-Anaheim segment meeting, a packed auditorium well-attended by 150 or so folks whom, I noticed, were at least 40 years of age and above. Anyways, I'll write tomorrow more on it.

Below is pasted a copy of OCTA's latest Weekly Update newsletter. The most interesting part of the newsletter is this:

Policy Committee to Meet about Major Investment Study

Thursday, Jan. 28 –  The Central County Corridor Major Investment Policy Advisory Committee meeting will take place at OCTA headquarters in conference room 103 / 104 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. Contact Fernando Chavarria at (714) 560-5306 or fchavarria@octa.net.

If you recall, this is the proposal to extend the 57 freeway underneath the Santa Ana River, or even operate light rail/buses near the river. I think anyone interested in future of Orange County's transit should attend this meeting. read more→

I'm catching up with the past week's big stories. In summary, it doesn't look good for transit: Schwarznegger plans to again raid transit funds and zero it out to bail out other government programs, Metrolink has taken aim at stripping 50% of its weekend Orange County train service plus OC mid-day service, and OCTA officials continue to praise highway construction at its Board meetings while its bus service goes down in flames: more cuts likely in store this year. I'll post more articles on this shortly.

OC Weekly's Spencer Kornhaber has written "Night-Owl Bus Riders Face the End of the Line," an extensive, deeply-researched article. He's interviewed OCTA board members, spoken with OCTA's former CEO Art Leahy, rode on crowded buses with the Transit Advocates, and heard from transit riders in Orange County. Kudos to him (and thanks for mentioning TransitRiderOC.com!). Here's a choice excerpt about OCTA's imbalanced transportation priorities and what the Transit Advocates have been trying to do:

 Scores of riders packed OCTA “community meetings” and public hearings to weigh in on which plan to adopt. One after another, they got up during public comment and gave their stories, from the handicapped person whose route to vocational training was on the chopping block to commuters regularly passed by on street corners by buses already too packed with riders. At nearly every bus-related meeting, Jane Reifer, a slight 45-year-old with brown corkscrew hair, came up to the microphone and gave her take on OCTA’s dilemma.

“I represent a group called Transit Advocates of Orange County,” Reifer said at one hearing. “Our overriding philosophy regarding cuts is to retain service where there are no alternatives. This is so that we do not strand riders. This is different than what sounds like a very laudable goal: OCTA’s goal of inconveniencing the fewest amount of riders.”

Reifer’s message wasn’t new to OCTA’s board, and neither was Reifer herself. She founded Transit Advocates toward the beginning of the previous decade to fight an earlier overhaul of the bus system—known as “straight-lining”—that left many riders confused and adrift. The group had since then gone into dormancy, but it re-formed in 2009 after OCTA’s budget problems began. The Advocates—loosely organized, with an e-mail list of about a thousand and a regularly updated blog at transitrideroc.com—have had an impact on the decision-making process, OCTA staffers say. A few of their suggestions have been included in the official reduction plan, according to Scott Holmes, OCTA’s manager of service planning.

The Advocates’ biggest contribution, though, may have been hammering home one idea to OCTA board members: Bus cuts should protect “span,” a term that refers to the total length of time over which a bus route runs in a day. To the Advocates, the only morally defensible way to reduce bus service is by preserving span as well as the system’s geographic footprint, so some semblance of bus service remains for people who have grown to depend on it. Cutting the first or last bus of the day on a route means that the route’s riders are mobile for fewer hours of the day—which has a big impact on their ability to get to and from jobs. And while reducing the midday frequency of heavily trafficked routes would be a big hassle for a lot of people, wholly eliminating less-used routes (night-owl among them) might devastate the lives of a handful of riders.

But the reduced reduction comes as little comfort to the Transit Advocates, who contend that OCTA doesn’t have to be in the fiscal position it’s in. Transportation agencies across the country are facing budget problems, but not all are scaling back bus service as deeply as OCTA is. The Transit Advocates argue that OCTA’s inherent bias toward road-building over mass-transit operations has left the bus system vulnerable. “The bus system has had access to an awful lot of money over the years,” Reifer says. “We could have developed a world-class bus system, but instead have siphoned it off to other things.”

OCTA top brass, though, object to the idea that the agency disfavors bus service. “In my discussions with the board, they’re vitally concerned with having a robust transit system,” says OCTA CEO Will Kempton, who left the top spot at CalTrans to replace Leahy in June 2009. “Contrary to popular belief, we have a very significant transit-dependent population in Orange County. I certainly don’t see that as a second tier.”

Indeed, bus availability in Orange County reached a historic high in the past decade. Ridership numbers, though, didn’t climb as steadily. Some point to that fact as evidence that the purpose of bus service should be reexamined: Perhaps, OCTA director and county Supervisor John Moorlach publicly speculated in August, OCTA shouldn’t be providing bus service at all.

Kempton says there’s no guarantee that service hours will return to their previous heights when the economy recovers, but that might not be a bad thing. “If there’s anything positive that comes out of this economic climate, it’s the necessity to really look at how we operate transit service in this county,” he says. “One of the things that I’ve heard from board members all along [is that] nobody likes to see these kinds of cuts. But they’ve also said we need to see our most efficient service possible.”

But Reifer says riders were taking advantage of the bus in boom times. The problem was that other factors were hurting ridership. A fare hike in 2004 preceded a drop of nearly a million quarterly boardings on fixed-route buses. Just as ridership climbed above its previous level again in 2007, a drivers’ strike of more than a week that left most of the county without buses dented ridership for more than a year. Boardings eventually began to tick up again—just before the budget crisis hit, fares were increased and service was slashed. Given those facts, Transit Advocates say, it’s little wonder that November 2009 ridership was down 18.3 percent from where it was the previous year.

The big problem with the bus system in Orange County, Reifer says, is that its reserves and revenue sources have been used as ATMs for other projects. After Orange County’s 1994 municipal bankruptcy, the county entered into an agreement to pay off debt by drawing from the funds that were meant to support bus service. A net $15 million has been taken out of the bus system every year since 1997 ($38 million was taken out in 1996). By 2013, when the debt agreement ends, the bus system will be $202 million poorer than it would have been had it not been used to help bail out the bankruptcy.

And in 2005, the board voted to use bus and rail money to help the city of Santa Ana widen Bristol Street. It had originally been believed that Bristol would be a major route for the county’s proposed CenterLine rail system—but that project was killed in 2005. Since then, $35 million that could have gone to buses countywide has been spent on one municipality’s road widening, with an additional $31 million to be spent next year. The Transit Advocates have lobbied the OCTA board to withdraw from the Bristol Street project and recover the dollars—which could, for example, pay for the soon-to-be-eliminated night-owl service hours 22 times over. The board has looked at the idea but seems reluctant to go through with it. It just isn’t right, they say, to abandon a commitment like that.

Keith May, a photographer with the OC Weekly, also chronicles his adventures in "Uneasy Riding on the Night Owl Buses." This seems to mirror my experience riding the 57 after midnight, but it's not unlike my other adventures traveling night-time buses (Metro Local 232 from LAX to Long Beach, and VTA's Hotel 22, for example):

...I’m reminded more than once there is no shortage of paranoid schizophrenics in Orange County. Out of its element and unaccustomed to being awake at these hours, my brain occasionally short-circuits, too. Sleepwalking through a bizarre, abstract reality that’s not for the faint of heart or germaphobic. In the window, the reflection of a white man approaching middle age crouched morosely in the corner catches my eye. Deep-set eyes under a hooded sweat shirt staring in my direction. He has a camera in his hand. It’s only me. And I’m starting to fit right in. I look from the window to the floor, at my own dirty boots and the soiled sneakers of my companions. I can buy new ones (barely), but the bag lady rummaging through her belongings will have to find hers in a Dumpster. She pulls out an old Sony Walkman and inserts the earphones. No CD. No battery. Just privacy. 

Thanks again to Keith May, Spencer Kornhaber, and the OC Weekly for bringing awareness of transit issues to Orange County. read more→

Roughly 30 riders attended OCTA's March 2010 bus cuts community meeting last Thursday, with quite a few speakers (at least 20) including seniors, working professionals, blue-collar workers, students, disabled persons, a homeless person and a former bus driver. Even a member of the Orange County Grand Jury attended. Mayor Pro Tem Cathy Green and Greg Winterbottom — both OCTA directors — chaired the session with Ellen Burton, External Affairs Director of OCTA staff.

The comments made by the public were extremely interesting and engaging. A lot of riders opposed route cuts that would diminish geographic service area, as this would then cannibalize ACCESS, Orange County's current paratransit network, which only services areas 3/4 of a mile from regular bus routes. One Night Owl rider said he, plus many others, use the 24-hour bus routes to get home from work; OCTA staff responded by saying cutting Night Owl would save 5% of the funds as Night Owl requires not just paying the bus driver, but also maintenance, central dispatch, and ACCESS drivers. And a new issue also emerged: a growing number of riders were worried about overcrowded standing-room only buses, particularly those buses that travel at high speeds on the freeway.

Community leaders from the Transit Advocates of Orange County also asked OCTA's board about funds OCTA already has and could use for saving bus service; Jane Reifer mentioned that not printing the quarterly system map would salvage $2 million that could preserve the 24-hour Night Owl routes. I myself asked why OCTA declared a financial crisis and are cannibalizing bus service when they're about to expand the 5, 91, and 405 freeways. OCTA director Greg Winterbottom replied that many of these funds — such as funds dedicated to the freeways — couldn't be switched over as the "color of money" is dedicated to specific purposes. But others argued why OCTA wouldn't be more aggressive with finding funding when OCTA used bus service funding for non-transit programs like the purchase the 91 Express Lanes, widening Bristol Street, and promoting non-public transit programs of Measure M and M2.

I followed the meeting throughout on my HTC Touch Pro2's with a live Twitter session @TransitRiderOC, posted below, from first tweet to last tweet: read more→

At the Board of Directors meeting yesterday, 40 bus riders appeared and 20 made the case for the Board to preserve Night Owl service until the massive bus service cut in December of this year. An excerpt from the recent Transit Advocates e-mail sent out spells the details in bold:

While we will be losing approximately 100,000 service hours in frequency cuts and new short turns which will be very painful, at least they will be keeping weekday “span” (first and last buses of the day) for routes with more than 8 riders or 8 riders devised from combining 2 lower-ridership trips. We also got a reprieve on Night Owl service until December – an additional 3 months. At that time, it will be eliminated unless staff recommends that some Night Owl service be saved based on specific employer needs.

As predicted, they also asked staff to come back in 30 days with a plan for the next round of service cuts in December, and what it would look like to implement the full remaining 300,000 service hours cuts all at once, instead of staggered over 3 more service changes.

Director Bill Campbell was valiant in his efforts to explain bus riders’ needs, and was supported by Director Pat Bates and Director Richard Dixon.

This story made the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register, Telemundo, and KOCE's “Real Orange” (Thursday at 6:30 and 11:00 PM, Friday at 8:00 AM). read more→

The L.A. Times just published an article focusing especially on OCTA's Night Owl service, running 24-hour service on their most heavily-used routes. From Ms. Esquivel's article:

Nearly seven years ago, transportation leaders in Orange County rolled out predawn bus service to help graveyard-shift workers who often found themselves walking or pedaling bikes across the sleeping county as they tried to get home.

Now, with the Orange County Transportation Authority facing severe budget shortfalls, the Night Owl service, which runs from midnight to 4 a.m. on four routes through the heart of the county, is facing elimination.

...

The Night Owl service was launched in 2002 shortly after Arthur Leahy was hired as the agency's chief, and patterned after late-night bus routes he started when he was head of the transportation agency in Minneapolis. Leahy now heads the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

In Orange County, the four Night Owl routes have served a largely Latino ridership, mostly factory, hotel and restaurant workers whose shifts end long after regular buses stop running. Before the service was introduced, many workers said, they often walked or biked five miles or more to get home, trudging from Newport Beach or Irvine to Santa Ana and Garden Grove.

Night Owl riders said riding the bus helped them feel safe commuting to and from work in the predawn hours. The lines run north-south from Brea to Newport Beach and La Habra to Costa Mesa, and east-west from central Orange County to Long Beach. They serve about 350 riders a day.

Read the full article here. read more→

Here's an e-mail and a flyer from the Transit Advocates:

OCTA Bus Service Reduction Vote – Monday, June 8, 9 am

OCTA Headquarters, 1st Floor, Rm. 154, 600 S. Main St., Orange

Please get as many people as you can to attend this last meeting on the service cuts, even if they can’t speak.

Although we are against making any cuts, if on Monday we don’t prioritize which types of cuts we can live with and which are unacceptable, we will lose even MORE crucial service. After this meeting we will resume our campaign to address bus funding issues. Today, 3 options are being offered by OCTA staff:

Option A – 100,000 service hour cuts including cutting all Night Owl (24-hour) service – This is the staff recommendation

Option B – 100,000 service hour cuts but retain “Night Owl” service with last bus until (not departing) 1 am

Option C – 100,000 service hour cuts but retain all Night Owl (24-hour) service

We need to convey these 2 messages:

1. Retain night owl service with the last trip departing after 1 AM (”departing,” not “until”).
2. Retain all span (the first and last buses of the day)

It will not be pleasant, but most riders can wait a little more, crowd a little more, stand a little more, and walk a little more when frequency is reduced. If span or Night Owl service is cut, though, there are NO alternatives and we will be stranded. These are key points for ACCESS riders, because if span and Night Owl service are cut, ACCESS hours will also be cut. read more→

The financial "doomsday scenario" now has a deadline: June 2010.

OCTA just posted a dedicated section of their site outlining their cuts and explaining the budget situation. They have a list of 59 routes that they say they may curtail service on or are considering for outright elimination. Let me break it down for you. I modified their system map with these cuts (click on the image to the left; 400 kb PNG file). A summary of potential cuts:

• 59 bus routes may be cut, along with...
• All 24-hour service
• All "community bus" service
• Nearly all community shuttles
• Nearly all intra- and inter-county express buses

Santa Ana, for example, will find a lot of their bus service cut, leaving behind a skeleton of local service for the transit-dependent.

It's now impossible to get to the airport:

But I think, worst of all, it's now impossible to get to and from UC Irvine. OCTA may eliminate lines 59, 79, 175, 178 (along with 213 and 473), stranding students, faculty, employees, and, well, making the UC Irvine U-pass useless.

Of course, that's my interpretation of what OCTA posted. I've pasted the summary from OCTA's page. Got any thoughts? Make sure you send your comments to them! read more→