BUS DRIVER FATIGUE GOES UNCHECKED, AUDIT SAYS.

Byline: Troy Anderson Staff Writer

Some MTA bus drivers work more than the allowed 10 hours a day, hold down second jobs and get traffic tickets without their bosses ever knowing, according to a state audit Monday.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority lacks tracking systems to determine whether fatigue among drivers who work long hours and who moonlight contributed to any of the more than 2,100 bus crashes since 1998, the state report said.

At one MTA bus facility, auditors found 16 drivers who said they held second jobs. Four of them said they moonlighted 40 hours a week. One of those jobs involved driving.

Sen. Richard Alarcon, D-Van Nuys, who requested the audit after last year's 32-day transit strike, said Monday that he got the sense during hearings last year that officials in the transit agency were not keeping track of bus crashes to determine what role fatigue played.

``To put it in broader terms, I don't think the MTA gives a damn about bus drivers,'' Alarcon said. ``The audit confirms that from the perspective of driver and passenger safety. They don't care enough to do an adequate job of monitoring driver fatigue, and that is part of the puzzle of how they don't care about bus drivers in general.

``With regard to passenger and driver safety, it's absolutely egregious that they have allowed management to deteriorate to this extent. I will be conducting a hearing as part of the selection committee on the MTA to discuss this issue.''

State Auditor Elaine M. Howle wrote in the new audit that the MTA lacks systems to prevent drivers from violating state and federal restrictions limiting how many hours a day drivers spend on the road.

``With a fleet of 2,500 buses, the MTA transports more than one million passengers each day,'' Howle wrote. ``The safety of these passengers and the public at large rests in part on the MTA's success in restricting the driving hours of its almost 4,000 bus drivers.''

MTA officials say even though drivers were involved in 2,123 avoidable crashes between July 1998 and May of this year, the MTA has the second- safest rate among large transit systems nationwide at 1.17 crashes per 100,000 miles driven.

``We're the second-safest,'' said MTA Chief Operating Officer Allan Lipsky, pointing out that the MTA's crash rate is lower than Chicago, Philadelphia and New York. ``(Only) New Jersey transit has a better record among large transit agencies.

``It's unfortunate the audit dealt with record-keeping and procedures and the most important issue, the fact that the MTA does run a very safe system, wasn't emphasized in the report.''

James Williams, chairman of the United Transportation Union, said the bus drivers union appreciates the audit.

``We accept it and we will do what we can to work with the MTA to make sure that it is in compliance with the appropriate state and federal regulations,'' Williams said.

The audit found that the MTA does not have the ability to prevent drivers from working more than 10 hours a day since it cannot track actual driving time and needs better methods to identify drivers who moonlight and work even longer hours.

The audit, conducted at the request of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee to determine whether the MTA complies with laws to protect the safety of the bus riders and drivers, reviewed the files of 260 drivers and found that 26, or 10 percent, worked more than 10 hours a day.

Of those 26 drivers, four were involved in incidents on days they worked more than 10 hours.

``However, because the MTA does not accurately track or maintain sufficient information, we could not correlate bus driver fatigue with these accidents,'' Howle wrote.

Auditors also reviewed the files of 81 drivers and found three who held second jobs without their managers' knowledge. All three of those drivers had had avoidable crashes.

At one MTA bus facility, for example, auditors found 16 drivers who said they held second jobs. Of those, four said they worked 40 hours a week at their second jobs. One of those jobs involved driving.

MTA spokesman Marc Littman said drivers are not allowed to work more than 10 hours a day.

``The MTA recognizes that safety comes first,'' Littman said. ``If someone calls in saying they were up all night with their kid or sick, we'll shut that bus down immediately and get a new driver out there.''

The state audit found, in addition to not knowing when drivers violate work hour rules, the MTA's Vehicle Accident Monitoring System - which tracks the number of crashes - contains numerous errors and is not useful to determine the cause of incidents.

Auditors also found that drivers frequently fail to disclose traffic citations to their managers.

Auditors found 2,237 bus drivers received citations between July 1998 and April of this year. Of those, 111 were cited while operating an MTA or other government vehicle.

Looking at 55 of those citations, auditors were unable to find any evidence that managers were aware of citations in 39 cases.

Unaware of the citations, managers cannot discipline or discharge drivers, Howle wrote.

``This high percentage indicates that bus drivers generally do not report their citations, even ones received while driving on duty,'' she wrote.

Lipsky of the MTA said the agency has allocated $8.2 million toward improvements in record-keeping to ensure the agency fully complies with state and federal regulations.

``We believe we are in full compliance with state and federal regulations,'' Lipsky said. ``We don't think, based on the information studied, there is any evidence that driver fatigue is a systematic problem here.''