oc weekly

Ask for Bus Funding In The New Jobs Bill

Our partners at Transportation for America are asking everyone to sign on to their letter asking President Obama to  make sure transit jobs and America's bus and rail systems are a priority in the upcoming jobs bill. They’ll deliver the letter in person during a meeting with administration officials. With your help, they’ll urge the President to make sure the jobs bill includes funding to stop the hemorrhaging in our transit agencies and prevent layoffs, loss of service and draconian fare hikes. Here are their 3 principles to ensure funds go to where they’re most needed: 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→