RIDERS, MTA DISPUTE CROWDING; COURT TO DECIDE IF MTA VIOLATES LIMITS FOR NUMBERS STILL STANDING ON BUSES.

Byline: David Bloom Daily News Staff Writer

On a rush-hour morning last week, a 43-seat bus jammed with 66 passengers pulled up to the subway station at the corner of Vermont Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard and let out its riders.

A woman waiting at the stop quickly counted heads and noted the bus and the time on a form wedged on her clipboard.

That head count, performed hour after hour at stops along some of the busiest bus lines in Southern California, is the heart of a brewing battle over whether the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is meeting a federal consent decree to reduce crowding.

MTA officials said they met the consent decree's deadline last week for dropping the average number of people who have to stand on a bus from about 19 to 15. By 2002, the crowding will have to drop to an average of only nine standing.

But the Bus Riders Union, which was one of the plaintiffs in the 1994 lawsuit that led to the 1996 decree, disagrees sharply.

Like the MTA, the Bus Riders Union has had its own army of head counters at bus stops around Los Angeles.

Unlike the MTA, the Bus Riders Union says passengers are routinely jammed like sardines on the buses, especially at rush hour on the 20 most heavily used lines.

``What this shows is systemic overcrowding on line after line,'' said Ted Robertson, a Bus Riders Union organizer who oversees the group's effort to track bus crowding.

Lawyer to resolve dispute

The disagreement has been rumbling for months and will have to be resolved in coming weeks by Donald Bliss, the Washington-based attorney appointed by U.S. District Judge Terry Hatter as special master to oversee the consent decree's implementation.

If Bliss and Hatter decide the MTA is routinely exceeding the standards set in the decree, they could order the agency to get more buses on the road.

Robertson said there is plenty of proof the MTA is exceeding the decree's limits, at least on the system's most important lines.

On those 20 lines, the crowding limit is exceeded on 85 percent of the rush-hour buses, Robertson said. In some cases, more people are standing than sitting on a 43-seat bus, or a bus is so full it drives past stops where people are waiting to get on.

MTA Deputy Chief Executive Officer Allan Lipsky said, however, that systemwide, 24 hours a day, the agency is meeting the decree's standard 97 percent of the time.

Even on the busiest lines, the MTA is meeting the consent decree's standards, even during rush hour, at least 95 percent of the time, Lipsky said.

``Some degree of failure is permitted because there may be unanticipated events, such as a film letting out,'' Lipsky said. ``The real issue is whether we have enough scheduled service and enough system reliability to provide that service. We think we do.''

Both the Bus Riders and the MTA have deployed people, all trained by the MTA, to count the passengers.

The MTA checkers regularly track ridership both ways all day from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on the 20 most heavily used lines, said Dana Woodbury, the MTA's deputy executive officer for operations planning.

The checkers also monitor 57 other lines - of more than 100 in the MTA system - on a quarterly basis.

Limited resources

Though the agency has not identified what it considers an acceptable level of failure, Woodbury said, MTA officials believe the current 3 to 5 percent level of extremely crowded buses is not excessive.

To put enough buses on the street to ensure the agency never exceeded the crowding standards would be impossibly expensive and wasteful of the agency's limited resources, Lipsky and Woodbury said.

``We have consistently said that is an impossible standard,'' Woodbury said. ``Our position is that we are operating at an acceptable level for the entire spectrum of 77 lines that we regularly monitor.''

The Bus Riders Union maintains the MTA should be doing a much better job, particularly on the heavily used lines at rush hour, Robertson said.

``We're trying to go by this word for word,'' Robertson said about limits mentioned in the consent decree.

If the two sides can't resolve their very different views on how well the MTA is doing, Bliss will have to decide, probably before the end of February.

He or Hatter could force the agency to get more buses on the streets beyond the 1,313 replacement vehicles the MTA plans to buy in the next six years, Lipsky acknowledged.

Bliss did not return phone calls seeking comment. He already has ruled that figures compiled by the Bus Riders Union are admissible as evidence, as are the MTA's figures.

The process of documenting ridership is a tediously slow if simple one. The checkers' passenger totals are averaged over 20-minute time frames during rush hour, or hourlong periods during nonpeak times, to determine a load factor or ratio of passengers to seats.

On Tuesday, on the northbound side of Vermont Avenue, where it crosses Wilshire Boulevard, two Bus Riders Union counters were toting up the passengers on routes 204 and 354. They are the most heavily used routes on the entire system, with an estimated 45,000 riders a day.

Between 8:20 a.m. and 8:55 a.m. Tuesday, five buses stopped at the corner while Mary Aguirre and Guadalupe Rivera kept count.

Only one bus, with 36 riders, had seats for everybody, even though with school out and many people on vacation, ridership should have been low. Three of the buses, including one with 66 passengers, had more than 15 standing.

But Aguirre, who regularly counts ridership at the stop, said the totals were relatively light Tuesday, without student commuters.

``On a regular school day, there will be like 70 people on the buses,'' Aguirre said.

Lipsky said bad performance on the Vermont lines was unusual, caused by change in management last week at the division where Line 204/354 buses are based.

Crowding burdens

Extra safety inspections were ordered Tuesday morning, and 16 of 233 buses weren't allowed to roll out, Lipsky said.

He declined to detail what led to the management change and said he did not have any details on the additional safety inspections needed for buses that were kept off the streets.

Though Lipsky termed the crowding unusual, records show that rush-hour crowding is common.

The MTA's own Vermont line counts northbound and southbound on Dec. 1 and 5 showed the buses were overcrowded in 13 percent of the time periods, particularly during the morning rush hours.

Crowding has been regularly noted at least since March, MTA and Bus Riders Union records show.

``I barely got off the bus now, it was so crowded,'' said Toni Brown, who was headed from her home in Watts to her receptionist job in Santa Monica. ``I had to push over people to get off,'' added Brown, 19.

And it's not confined to the Vermont lines. Lines 66 and 67, which run across the Garment District into poor, transit-dependent areas on either side of downtown Los Angeles, are even worse, Aguirre said.

``At Eighth Street and Broadway, you'll see 80 people on a bus,'' Aguirre said. ``It's like murder. Little kids are crying and getting stepped on.''

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Photo

PHOTO Mary Aguirre of the Bus Riders Union counts Metropolitan Transit Authority passengers at the corner of Vermont Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News