MTA Approves Purchase of 223 New Buses

Besieged by bus riders, civil rights attorneys and, most important, an iron-willed federal judge who has ordered improvements in a bus system that can be described charitably as a mess, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Thursday took a major step toward replacing much of its aging fleet.

The MTA board gave final approval to the purchase of 223 buses and signaled its intent to buy 215 more.

In a first for the transit agency, about half of the new buses will have low floors with no steps, designed to speed up boarding. They will have ramps, a feature that officials hope will solve the chronic problems with wheelchair lifts on existing buses.

Separately, the board approved a pilot project to put 67 additional buses and shuttles on the streets to aid the transit-dependent in reaching jobs, schools and health centers. The project is among the bus improvements required by a federal consent decree.

The actions came as the transit agency struggles to comply with the court order setting a Dec. 31 deadline for alleviating crush loads on the MTA’s most heavily used bus lines.

Complaints about late buses or packed buses passing waiting passengers without stopping have been running at the highest level in a decade.

The agency runs one of the nation’s oldest fleets, with about 40% of the 2,116 buses well beyond the federally recommended replacement age of 12 years.

Critics of the agency have contended that it has neglected the bus system, which has 1.1 million boardings a day, to pursue glamorous rail projects. The only buses that the MTA or its predecessor agencies bought between 1988 and 1994 were 333 methanol buses. Those buses, since converted to ethanol, have turned into 40-foot lemons, breaking down so often that, on a typical day, one-third are out of service.

The new buses won’t arrive in time to help the agency meet the deadline for reducing standees on buses. Officials, nonetheless, say they expect to comply. But one of their strategies--lining up buses from other cities if needed--is not coming together. Officials said they have scoured the country as far as New York in search of spare buses, but have found none.

The first of the 223 buses will arrive in Los Angeles in early 1999. The buses, which will cost $83.6 million, will replace older buses operating in northeast and South-Central Los Angeles.

As always seems to be the case at the hapless MTA, the bus purchase was not without controversy.

Some bus riders left angry that the board had backed away from a promise to buy 278 buses immediately.

“We lost 55 buses today,” said Eric Mann, leader of the Bus Riders Union, a plaintiff in the civil rights lawsuit that produced the consent decree. He predicted more legal trouble for the MTA.

The board in September voted to buy 278 regular-floor buses, but on Thursday reduced the order to 223, saying it wanted to spend the money that would be saved to add the low-floor buses to the fleet faster. Critics of the agency worried that the action would delay replacement of older buses subject to repeated breakdowns.

Advocates for the disabled also were upset. They urged the board to hold up the purchase of any more buses with problematic wheelchair lifts and instead restart the bidding process to buy only low-floor buses.

“It is imperative for the disabled community that we can get on the buses, and we are not left on the sidewalk,” said Nadia D. Powers, chairwoman of the Los Angeles County Commission on Disabilities. The first low-floor buses are scheduled to begin arriving in 2000.

But County Supervisor and MTA board member Yvonne Brathwaite Burke said: “If we cancel this procurement, I believe we’re going to have another year and not one new bus.”

MTA officials gave assurances that lifts in the new buses would be more reliable.

Mayor Richard Riordan, chairman of the MTA board, said in a statement that Thursday’s action was “another example of how MTA is living up to both the letter and the spirit” of the consent decree.

All of the new buses will be powered by low-polluting compressed natural gas. The buses will be equipped with automated voice systems to announce stops, and bike racks.

The new or expanded service to jobs, schools and health centers will begin by early February and includes new shuttles in El Sereno and from Studio City to West Hollywood, and bus service from San Pedro to West Hollywood.

But Bus Riders Union leader Mann called the pilot program inadequate.

In other actions, the MTA board approved a new contract with the 1,750-member mechanics’ Amalgamated Transit Union, ensuring labor peace for three years.

The board also named the emergency freeway phone network the “Los Angeles County Kenneth Hahn call box system,” after the late county supervisor who conceived the idea in the early 1960s.