>Barbara Lott-Holland, Bus Riders Union member 
>I would ask you to keep your campaign promise to support the consent decree
>with the MTA to improve the bus system, one element, of course, being the
>purchase of 350 new buses.

MTA, from last year to next, has taken or will take delivery of 1,000 buses.
All of the buses are new, but these are replacing buses that have reached
their life cycle spans. These do not mean a fleet increase of 350 buses.
But after the Consent Decree, MTA has increased the fleet by about 250.

The BRU, of course, always wants double what the MTA buys.

>We have to put buses first, not rail. Not only will it reduce bus
>overcrowding but provide more jobs, because they will need more drivers to
>operate the new buses.

The BRU controls and monitors what its members have to say. And this sentence
here says a whole helluva lot. Nevermind the support of drivers over riders
during last year's strike, the BRU believes transit must have a make-work
component now.

>Right now the MTA is asking the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse
>the consent decree; we'd urge you to ask the MTA to stop its appeals. I
>would also like to see bus service expand. I work in Torrance and live near
>USC, and I must take three buses from three different municipalities to get
>from home to work.

What about the Harbor Transitway? Or ride back up to downtown and catch
Torrance 1 or 2? Each of these will get you into Torrance in under an hour.
Sorry, Barbie, but it's your fault that you're not taking advantage of a
shorter route.

>I would like to see bus service extended so it doesn't take young people who
>live in Watts 2 1/2 hours to get to UCLA.

Oops, it did it again. If the BRU wants to pick out random locations to show
a lack of service, Watts and UCLA is a bad choice. It is served by not one,
but two buses. One is Line 576, an M&B line that goes from south L.A. to
Pacific Palisades. The second is Line 305, which zig-zags through Watts,
South Central and Mid-City and goes to UCLA. By the way, Line 305 WAS A
CONSENT DECREE LINE! The BRU OK'd this route, and it doesn't even acknowledge
it.

Want to go to Disneyland, too?

(For those of you who do not get this reference, the BRU put out a flier a
few years back entitled "Who wants to go to Disneyland?" The BRU demanded
that MTA should run a service to Disneyland for both work and recreational
reasons. The BRU obviously did not know about Line 460, which runs between
downtown L.A. and Disneyland. It's not exactly a hard-to-find line. MTA
Customer Information has said that asking for information to get to
Disneyland is one of the top 10 most requested questions it receives.)

> We need buses that have wheelchair lifts that work;

That I can agree with. Ditto for low-floor ramps that properly fold out.

> we need more buses that run on compressed natural gas for less pollution.

Boy, is she out of step. MTA is no longer allowed to buy diesel.

>We're also asking for the bus fare to be reduced to a $20 monthly pass and a
>50-cent one-way fare.

We can always dream, can't we?

> Now it's $1.35, $42 for the monthly pass, and there are no family passes.

What family size are we talking here?

>The majority of people riding the bus are poor -- day laborers and such who
>don't work a complete month.

And there are those who have steady employment as well.

>If these families are making $1,000 a month, for a family of five to buy
>passes for everybody costs more than $200 out of the monthly income, and
>that's too much.

If the children go to school or college, they can get discount student passes.
Geez, you'd think a bus rider would know these things.

> We also need a $10 student pass. You have 6-year-old kid who gets on the
>bus, she has to pay $1.35, and that's ridiculous." 

There is a student pass. Geez, besides the indignity of only being able to
say what Eric Mann tells you to say, you'd think that as the premier transit
demagogue of L.A. County, he'd have his facts correct. If he'd get his ass
out of his BMW and put his $200,000 annual salary to work to do some basic
system research, he might actually have something going on here.