Bus Riders Say Free Fare Won’t Necessarily Make Things Square

It’s 10:45 a.m. and office worker Kim Tatarsky is late for work again.

No use getting upset, she tells herself, waiting for her bus at the corner of Roscoe and Sepulveda boulevards. This time it is her fault, not RTD’s. But as often as three times a week, says Tatarsky, a New York native who now lives in Panorama City, late buses make her late getting to her job in Van Nuys and it does not sit well with her boss.

“Out here everybody drives,” she says, looking west along Roscoe for the Line 152 bus. “So when you’re late for work, you don’t have an excuse.”

Like many regular riders in the San Fernando Valley, Tatarsky complains that buses in car-crazy Los Angeles often are late and sometimes do not arrive at all. “I don’t even bother with a schedule,” she says.

And although she cheers the Southern California Rapid Transit District’s decision this past week to offer fare rebates starting Sept. 1 on any bus that is more than 15 minutes late, Tatarsky says that measure won’t remedy riders’ tardiness in arriving at their destinations.

Often the problem, she says, is not that buses run more than 15 minutes late, but that they cause their riders to miss their transfers. If a bus arrives at a transfer point even a few minutes behind schedule, it can cause riders to wait another 30 to 45 minutes for the next one, she says.

RTD transports about 300,000 people every day in the Valley on 19 lines that cover 847 miles along a grid tracing major streets. According to RTD, only 2% of the buses arrive at their stops more than 10 minutes late, and during a day of riding around the Valley last week most buses ran on time. Some were even early.

But the punctuality--or the lack of it--of RTD buses in the Valley is but one concern of those who ride the buses daily.

Riding a bus in the Valley is not the journey through an urban Inferno peopled with bloodthirsty criminals and slobbering lunatics that many non-riders imagine. Most passengers seem to be average working people who keep to themselves. The windows are not so graffiti-scarred that they block the sunlight. And the ride is not so rough that it bruises passengers’ kidneys.

Passengers say riding buses in the Valley is not as bad as riding buses on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains--something many regular riders say they would never do. Even so, it’s no ride in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

The 7:57 a.m. bus on Line 243 leaves Corbin Avenue and Nordhoff Street heading south at 7:59 a.m. Shannon Lynn, 24, applies makeup as the bus bumps away from the corner toward Tarzana.

“I’m late. The bus is early,” she says as she wraps her damp straw-colored hair around the hot metal wand of a battery-powered curling iron. She says she has become something of an expert at applying her makeup on the bus during the 45-minute ride to her job as a bookkeeper at a hip Sherman Oaks clothing store.

Three or four times in the last month, she says, she has been late for work. Others on their way to work say they have had similar experiences.

“You can’t really depend on them,” says Mark Patterson, 29, of Chatsworth, who rides the bus every day to his job as a computer manager for an Encino advertising agency. “They get there when they get there. They march to the beat of a different drummer.”

To Patterson and other commuters, the story of Lylle Weiss has almost become legend aboard morning buses full of commuters. Weiss, a Van Nuys resident who rides the bus to work at the federal courts building downtown, asked for--and got--a $270 refund from the RTD in April because he had been made late for work 15 times in three months.

RTD Board President Nikolas Patsaouras says the current rebate campaign has “nothing to do with” the Weiss case. “This is a simple private-industry guarantee applied to a public agency,” he says.

When time is of no concern, the bus works fine, says Lee Ablad, 75, of Encino. Ablad, who rides the bus a few times each week, was on his way to the drugstore to buy a new hose nozzle that’s on sale for 99 cents. The one he’s got leaks, he says.

Clutching a cold can of Pepsi, Tamika Coleman, 14, of Panorama City, says she never is late for school in Pacoima. She rides Line 166, which runs along Nordhoff and Osborne streets, every day, to and from summer school classes.

Leaving Winnetka Avenue, the 8:24 a.m. bus of Line 424 is nearly empty. But as the bus heads east along Ventura Boulevard and then over Cahuenga Pass into downtown, seats become hard to find and the aisles fill. Many of the riders are Latino.

Somewhere around Ventura and Balboa boulevards, the bus rider’s nightmare gets on board. His dark hair and beard are shaggy and he squints madly around the bus through bottle-bottom glasses. He slings his black vinyl portfolio around him, smacking a few riders on the legs, before he picks a seat near the front. His portfolio--$12.95 at Standard Brands, according to the price tag--blocks the aisle and other passengers climb over it to seats further back. He mumbles, then shouts, “Who else is that stupid?”

The man next to him moves away.

“It’s like a different world,” Tatarsky says. Cars sit jammed at the stoplight of the Valley’s busiest intersection.

The 11:13 a.m. bus arrives at 11:12 a.m. and Tatarsky pushes her way aboard. The doors close behind her and the bus grinds off in a gray cloud of exhaust.

She is already more than an hour late for work.