Opinion: Bus fuss, part II: $5 for a day pass?

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Talk of a fare hike for L.A. buses and rail has put the Bus Riders Union in full attack mode, firing up the kind of organizing drive that made it a major player in local transit planning a decade ago. Its tactic: put volunteers on buses all over the city to hand out flyers calculated to enrage everybody on board, especially if they happen to have brown skin. The goal is to make people think that routine and necessary planning decisions are really part of a campaign of class and ethnic warfare directed at the nonwhite.

Last week, the BRU’s target was the Los Angeles Times, for having the audacity to suggest in an editorial that raising fares was a responsible move in the face of a $105-million operating deficit at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Its latest flyer lists prices that it claims are 2007 fare hike proposals from the MTA -- a day pass would rise to $5 from its current $3, a monthly pass would cost $75 (up from its current $52) and a monthly pass for seniors would rise all the way from its current $12 to $37.50. The flyer says the Bus Riders Union ‘received important information from a reliable source’ about the fare hikes. That reliable source, in fact, was L.A. County Supervisor Gloria Molina, the chairwoman of the MTA board, who released the numbers last week in a press release during a fit of pique about a proposal to let runners in the L.A. Marathon ride public transit for free on race day. There’s just one problem with the numbers: They aren’t real.

The MTA actually hasn’t yet made any formal proposals about fare hikes, and contrary to the BRU’s assertion that its figures ‘will be announced publicly in the next couple of weeks,’ there are no plans to do so. MTA board members don’t seem to be in any hurry to open the whole politically explosive debate and can be expected to put off discussion of the matter as long as possible. They have until the end of June to make a decision, since the MTA’s fiscal year starts July 1. Meanwhile, the MTA is lobbying for $100 million in state funds that might render an immediate fare hike unnecessary, although even if the agency gets the money, it would only delay the pain of making a fare-hike decision until next year.

Despite all this, Molina didn’t just make those fare numbers up; she probably got them from internal proposals about possible fare hikes, or from private discussions with transit planners. They wouldn’t be unprecedented. Five dollars for a day pass, for example, is precisely what transit riders pay in Chicago, while in Boston such a pass goes for $9. But they are a bit draconian for Los Angeles, where low fares are a must both to encourage ridership from commuters and to serve our huge population of transit-dependent people. Particularly harsh, and probably politically unfeasible, is the 200% rise in the price of a monthly pass for seniors that Molina cited.

Hopefully, when the real numbers from the MTA come out, they’ll be more manageable. Undoubtedly there will be a range of possible fare hikes for consideration by the board, though the lower the fare, the more service will have to be cut. Contrary to the utopian ideas of the Bus Riders Union, that’s just the way it works in the real world.