A post for the person who transfers. To live and ride in LA.

The invisible transfer bus rider. Imperial/Blue Line Station in Watts. 2008.

Much of the advocacy in the alt transit movement is not for the people who transfer. The people who transfer from a working class suburb to the train from another bus, just to get off the train and get on yet another bus. There isn’t much talk of the people who have two and three hour commutes and there are lots of them. I see them. I see them when they get off the bus in downtown to get on the train with me and then get on to another bus.

I want to know what about these people’s rights?

What about these people right now? Do they really have to wait until Measure R funds kick in for relief?

I love trains. I love taking the train, when I first took my leap into public transit I refused to take any mode of public transit other than the train, but of course I lived in Los Feliz and then I moved to downtown, where I was able to make that choice, but for a time I lived in Boyle Heights.

In Boyle Heights if I had a meeting in Hollywood in the morning this is what my commute looked like.

4:30 am in the morning I got up. I got on the 5:20ish Montebello 40 to transfer to the Red Line at a little before 6:00, I got off at Western and Hollywood and got on the 757 Rapid 207 Rapid and then I took the 10 bus to my final destination.

That’s what I had to do, not daily, but often enough. Often enough to think wow, this is completely horrible and it’s completely unfair that there are people who have to do this on a daily basis to go to jobs that pay little money to clean people’s houses or watch people’s kids that this is the kind of journey they have to go on just to work for practically free. They have to stand at the most dirty bus stop in the world (Hollywood and Western) make all of these odd transfers, because even though there is a bus that may get close to where they are going in theory, to make it on time you have to learn all of these odd tricks, to account for broken down busses (which happen a lot more than it should,) to account for busses just not showing up, to account for busses that pass you, because they are so packed with people doing the same thing, trying to get to work or trying to get home.

And I think in the alt transit advocacy circles (cycling and public transit)  that most of the people must not have 9-5 jobs that they HAVE to be at on time to. That most of the people in advocacy circles don’t have to go from one side of LA County to the other. And I also think that there aren’t too many 60 year old women of color with arthritis advocating for their rights.

When I did my commute from Boyle Heights, that is who I saw a lot of. I saw a lot of older women. Women who couldn’t walk very fast, women who had many ailments, but they had to keep working to keep their health insurance for an even sicker husband at home or even to keep their health insurance for themselves.

And I think all of these people who want to tell positive stories must have never had to take these kinds of commutes. Must not know or want to know or see the people who have these kinds of commutes, because if they did they wouldn’t have such a rosy picture of Metro.

They wouldn’t have such a rosy picture of Metro if they lived in Watts and had to take four busses to guard a building on the Westside for a little bit over minimum wage.

I sometimes took a commute that was the Red Line to the 204  south to some other sort of bus that sometimes showed up and sometimes didn’t and on that line I met this young man who was a security guard in Century City. He was a security guard/ can collector. He would get on the bus at 6:40am after working the night shift and he would get on in uniform with a bag of cans. He was very attractive, but he was missing a front tooth and he told me, thank god he had a job.

These are people who are not used to demanding fair treatment and are just happy for what they get and to me that’s a damn shame. That’s a damn shame that in America this is how many people live in my city.

Working all night long taking the bus two hours and still not having enough money to fix their teeth and then have to supplement their income by picking up cans around their guard station.

Many people want to know why I am so critical of Metro. I am critical of Metro, because I want 60 year old women and 21 year old security guards to have a better life. And a better life would start with a better bus service for the working class. A life that didn’t have to start 3 hours before arrival, because of such unreliable service and such spread out transfer connections that half your life you spend planning. I want Metro to see these people and to know that they exist.

No one is going to write about them, because they didn’t go to school with anyone, they don’t have a blog, they don’t fix their bicycle on the weekends, they don’t have time to march in various political fights, they don’t go to art galleries, they drink Coors beer unironically, they are just regular working persons. The person who gets up, goes to work, comes home, watches a little TV and then goes to sleep and does the same thing the next day and they do it for as long as someone will keep them on the payroll. They don’t complain, they don’t yell, they don’t cause problems, they are the unsqueakiest wheel. They are the average American. The one that isn’t shown on TV or commercials.

It’s not that I want to bash Metro. I just want Metro to look at the people who ride the bus. The real people. The people who have been doing it for twenty years not twenty minutes. The people who even when gas prices level out still won’t be able to afford a car.  The people who have to transfer. I want Metro to try to make those people’s lives just a little bit better and a little bit better would be just a few more bus lines and bus lines that are on time and transfer points where the driver is aware of what bus connects to that bus and has the courtesy to wait for that nanny or that maid or that security guard that needs to get home to pick up their baby from the babysitter and take that baby to another relative before they take a little nap and start up on job number two.

Sure I would like more middle class people to take the bus and wow I would love to tell you all of these fabulous stories and if you take the Red Line it is fabulous, but to me if I didn’t also some how tell the average person who takes the bus story too, the woman that transfers, that rosy story would be a lie of omission and I think the truth is always a much better story than a lie anyway.

Taking the bus isn’t like Sesame Street and to imply that, even with my small three years of experience would somehow to me be a slap in the face to that woman who has been taking the bus for twenty years to take care of some other person’s kids for under the table wages and now doesn’t even have enough money to retire with.

If I’m going to slap someone it’s definitely not going to be her.

by Browne Molyneux

Comments

[Ed Greenberg]

I had a nice ride and interesting conversation with a #2 UCLA bus driver yesterday. She spoke of her attitude toward her job -- a very positive attitude, in fact. I spoke of what I expected as a customer.

I told her that the most important thing to a bus rider is consistency. The system needs to do exactly what it says it will do -- or as close to it as the vagaries of traffic allow.

Browne's post about transfers is absolutely correct. The killer time-sink in public transit is the dwell time on the platform or bus stop, waiting for the bus. You need to be there a few minutes early, and you need a few minutes between busses. Even when the schedules match, each transfer adds at least 10 minutes to the trip, sometimes 20.

Add in age and disability, and you can get some pretty hellish trips. The walk from Orange Line to Red Line at Noho is a pretty good example of a barrier to a senior citizen or disabled person. Interestingly, the metro web site will sometimes kick out a connection there with a two minute headway. Just try... even in good shape.

[Gary K.]

I don't have to use the bus on a day to day basis, but I use it pretty often, and I think it's a pretty eye opening experience about the different folks living in our city. I sometimes take the Santa Monica 10 to get downtown, and almost everyone on that bus are daily commuters, and the driver always knows about half of them and greets them like friends. Most bus rides I've been on are not like that, but I have to admit I had a warm and fuzzy feeling from the sense of community on the little 10 chugging through freeway traffic.

I agree that we really need to work on transfer times. That is what kills buses for me. Except at the most barren times of day or the furthest distances, as a well conditioned cyclist I can get just about anywhere faster then the bus on my bike. But I know many people don't have that ability or cannot afford to drive, and they deserve better. I think affordable housing that is closer to job centers is also important in this, since many people live so far from work because the places they can afford to live are so disconnected from the economic centers of the city.

[Nancy]

I used to be one of those people who just didn't take Metro at all because I refused to ride anything else besides the train. Then my car got into disrepair and my new employer offered discounts for mass transit. I started taking the bus and soon discovered that the real issue was that it didn't run often enough. I've met people from other cities (Sarasota, Vegas) who tell me their buses come by every 15-30 minutes, but many of the buses I've taken in LA only come around once an hour! If they just doubled the frequency, that would make a HUGE difference. And that shouldn't take 30 years.