EDITORIAL : MASS TRANSIT SOLUTIONS; IT'S TIME TO GET L.A. REGION MOVING, LITERALLY.

LOS Angeles and nearby communities need better mass transit.

While the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has been spending billions of taxpayer dollars on a subway that basically serves only downtown, millions of residents who have no interest in going downtown have been paying sales taxes and getting little in return - crowded buses, fare increases and service cutbacks.

The challenge facing the region's residents and leaders is to develop systems that move more people and do it more economically.

The MTA's plans for a regional rail system were a fantasy, created from outlandish forecasts of federal funding and exaggerated predictions of future ridership. The fantasy gobbled up billions of taxpayer dollars, benefiting construction firms and MTA empire builders while demolishing the MTA's credibility with local voters and officials in Washington, D.C., alike.

Now, the MTA and mass transit are in dire need of attention and improvement in the Los Angeles County region.

Concrete progress must include credible reforms in management and administration of the MTA under the leadership of interim Chief Executive Officer Julian Burke.

MTA board members owe it to the public to make amends for the costly foolishness which the agency has perpetrated, ranging from its downtown megabucks Taj Mahal headquarters to cutbacks on bus lines in some of the poorest and most underserved areas of the county.

The MTA also must produce a face-saving plan for San Fernando Valley transit. The Valley has pumped more than $1 billion of sales taxes into transportation coffers but has seen its long-promised rail line pushed farther and farther back on the calendar until now it looks unlikely to happen in this lifetime, if ever.

The Valley and other shortchanged areas have a moral and legal right to improvements, and soon.

Those include more of the Smart Shuttle vans which recently began serving parts of the Valley, offering fixed-route and door-to-door service at affordable prices in limited areas.

Also needed are improvements in higher-capacity buses, including a new generation of super buses operating on restricted busways.

Those kinds of effective, concrete services can be financed by stopping the nonsense with the MTA's subway and other rail construction schemes.

However, even a lawsuit by bus riders, who were victorious in court, has failed to produce clear-cut improvements by the MTA. As a result of the riders' litigation, a judge ordered the MTA to improve bus service; but the agency did that at the same time as it was making cutbacks in other areas, which still leaves the public poorly served.

It's time to stop the shell game.

Leaders, with the support of the taxpaying and bus-riding public, need to set a deadline for the MTA to provide measurably better bus service.

If that fails and if the MTA keeps wasting money on rail construction, the public should give careful consideration to a drive to repeal Proposition A or Proposition C, or both. Those are local sales taxes for transportation improvements.

Stopping rail, getting the buses running efficiently and building a successful transit system will restore the MTA's credibility. But the stench of past mismanagement and corruption will not be purged until a grand jury is impaneled to look into where all those billions of dollars have gone and how an agency in charge of one of the costliest public works project in American history could go so wrong.