L.A. or Bus

Nobody loves riding--or dodging--the bus, concedes L.A. urban planner and bus champion Martha Welborne. “They’re slow, noisy, crowded, not reliable and, if you’re in a car, they’re always in the way.” Despite the bad rap, Welborne, 44, is driving to rehabilitate L.A.’s “least desirable form of transit.”

Welborne insists buses could affordably solve many of Southern California’s transportation woes. But the buses she envisions down the road aren’t today’s beleaguered front-loaders slogging through traffic. Welborne wants to bring a new breed of buses to town: swift, super-long vehicles that travel in dedicated lanes down the middle of major streets, with cars kept to outside lanes. These, Welborne projects, would move as many people as a subway and as quickly, thanks to specially timed stoplights. Plus, she calculates, such a setup could be built, mile for mile, at 1% to 5% of what the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is spending on its fraught subway construction.

Welborne saw a successful example of such a bus system in Curitiba, Brazil--whose experimental urban policies are studied by planners and developers globally--and she is committed to bringing a similar system to L.A. In February, she left her job as managing director of the L.A. office of the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and founded the nonprofit Surface Transit Project with a grant from the W. Alton Jones Foundation. Since then, she’s been working to introduce Curitiba’s idea to politicians who could make it happen, among them Mayor Richard Riordan, who, upon assuming chairmanship of the MTA in July, made it clear he wants to reorient L.A.’s mass transit focus from trains to buses. Riordan is intrigued by the Curitiba model and wants demonstration lines based on it running by 1999--L.A. Assemblyman Kevin Murray wants one of the first to run on Exposition Boulevard.

Murray and Deputy Mayor Stephanie Bradfield were part of a delegation Welborne took to Curitiba in May to see the city’s bus system firsthand. Though Curitiba has the second-highest rate of car ownership in Brazil, about 75% of its commuters--1.6 million people--ride the bus, compared to 5% of L.A. commuters. The Curitiba system combines the best features of bus and rail transit: Double-length 270-passenger buses travel along 37 miles of exclusive lanes. Rather than trudge one by one up to the driver’s till, passengers pay fares at platforms before boarding. When the bus pulls up and its large side doors open, people move on and off quickly. Motorists in L.A. might fear being pushed aside, but the Curitiba system benefits cars as well: The streets on either side of the corridors are reprogrammed to handle one-way traffic. “We need more buses,” says Bradfield. “This system could at least work as a stopgap.”

Welborne acknowledges her idea has moved along more quickly than she ever imagined. And while she expects to be invited to join planning teams bidding to build the first routes, she plans to sit back and “play watchdog.”

“I want to stay in a role where I can make sure politics doesn’t bog it down--I don’t have political motives,” she insists. “I just want the city to get these buses going.”