Hopes Riding On OCTA Buses

The cliche goes that Southern California is the land of freeways and car culture. True, as far as it goes. But there’s more.

Last month’s statistics from the American Public Transit Assn. in Washington aptly summarized Orange County’s dependence on buses for some transportation needs.

The association said the county has the fastest-growing population of bus riders in the country. During the first nine months of last year, the number of bus riders in Orange County increased from 34.3 million to about 37.6 million. That is concrete evidence that transportation engineers need to include buses in current and future operations.

To recover from the 1994 bankruptcy, the county stripped $15 million a year from the Orange County Transportation Authority. That caused OCTA to revamp bus operations. Unfortunately, it also prompted an initial cut in the pay of bus drivers and little or no pay increases for the next few years.

For the last three years, OCTA has managed to cope by reorganizing routes. It also plans to add some new buses and has launched an aggressive marketing campaign to get more people to take the bus.

That’s a good contrast with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in Los Angeles. The MTA has chased the dream of hundreds of miles of new rail lines, including subways, and has run into problems around every curve. The agency did promise more new buses, but its performance has been bad enough to draw a lawsuit from an organization representing bus passengers.

In Orange County, many of the new bus riders hold newly created jobs in the service sector. Fast-food industry workers, hotel maids and others with lower-pay jobs sometimes cannot afford cars and are forced to rely on buses to commute to work, shop and visit friends.

OCTA has recognized its obligation to serve those who must use public transportation. As the county becomes more urbanized and more densely populated, as job creation continues, bus ridership likely will increase as well. Buses will remain an essential part of the county’s infrastructure, along with the autos everyone thinks of when they think of Southern California.