Arthur Salm: Bus fare blues

Arthur Salm

The guy did the same thing every day, and it drove me crazy. He waited at the bus stop with the other passengers. When the door opened, he climbed aboard, took his turn approaching the fare box - and only then would he reach into his pocket and pull out a handful of change. Often as not, as he picked out dimes, nickels and pennies and dropped them in, there were three or four people behind him, stuck on the stairs, swaying, hanging on to the rail as he counted out his sixty cents.

Sixty cents. That was the adult bus fare in San Diego in 1980. I remember - just as I remember the guy who never had his change ready - because in those days that was my job: Driving a bus for San Diego Transit. (You probably suspect there’s more on that later, and you’re right.)

A little more than two months from now, on July 1, monthly passes will jump from $68 to $72 — and that’s after increasing from $64 on Jan. 1 of last year. The MTS board approved the hikes on March 27; SANDAG will most likely make it official on May 8.

Since my ticket-punch-wielding days almost 30 years ago, a one-way fare has gone from 60 cents to $2.25, nearly a four-fold increase. Consumer prices since that time have just about doubled, so if the bus fare was just keeping pace with inflation, it’d be around $1.20. But since the inflation figures are ballpark, let’s play it safe and say a fare of $1.50 would be the equivalent of 1980’s 60 cents.

But the bus fare in San Diego is $2.25, one of the highest in the nation. That means — and this is the last math, I swear — that the fare has increased about 50 percent since 1980. It’s half again as expensive to ride the bus. Routes are being truncated and eliminated, and hours of service cut, as well. If we want to keep as many people as possible away from mass transit, this is the way to do it. This will work.

(Bus Driver Story: This is actually about that same guy. One day, he dug his hand into his jeans pocket, and when he pulled it out a whole lot more change came out with it and spilled onto the grimy floor. He scrabbled around on his hands and knees, fetching what he could, then flung/dropped a handful into the fare box. “Hey,” he said when he looked at the coins, lying there. “I put in too much.” Sure enough, there was about seventy-eight cents in there. I hit the fare-box lever, the coins tumbled away, the fare box began to grind. “Sorry,” I said, “but I don’t carry change.” “So it’s just gone?” “Afraid so.” “I can’t get it back?” “Nope,” I said, “It’s water under the bridge.” He looked at me. “What does that mean?” “It means it’s gone, it’s over, nothing to be done about it.” “What water are you talking about?” I sighed. “It’s just an expression.” He shook his head, saying, “We’re not even going over any bridge.” I nodded at the words painted above the windshield and recited them aloud: “Please do not talk to the driver when the bus is in motion.”)

There are no villains. Transit funds from Sacramento have been slashed, and MTS is going to have to operate with a decimated budget. They could eliminate maintenance, which would work great for at least a few days, until tires started blowing and engines seizing up. They could fire all the professional, experienced drivers and hire first-comers from Craig’s List at minimum wage, which might work for an hour or two, though I wouldn’t count on it. They could do what they’re doing - cutting service and raising fares.

Or, with an infusion of (at this point, imaginary) funds from the city, they could lower fares and maintain current service. A drop in fares would, possibly, be revenue-neutral: A lot more people might ride if the cost was low enough. But even if not, we should alter our collective mind-set about mass transit: It isn’t supposed to pay for itself though the fare box; that will cover only a portion of the cost of running a good system. Europeans understand that, pay higher taxes, and in return get great mass transit. Everyone benefits. It promotes the general welfare, and they don’t even have Preamble to a Constitution they have to answer to.

(Bus driver story: I’m driving the Route 25 South, going down Highway 163 from Mission Valley to downtown via Sixth Avenue. A woman wobbles up the aisle to stand at my elbow. “Driver,” she says, “can you please let me know when we get to Grape Street?” I tell her I’ll try to remember. “But,” I said, “you’ll be able to see it’s coming up, because the cross streets are in reverse alphabetical order. There’ll be Spruce, then Redwood, then Quince, and so on. So you’ll know when we’re getting near Grape.” She nodded and moved back toward her seat. Then she turned around and was at my elbow again. “Driver,” she said, “why did they put the street names in reverse alphabetical order?” The Bizarro-zen question shorted out some neural pathways for a few seconds. When I recovered, I considered the Please-do-not-talk-to-the-driver-when-the-bus-is-in-motion option, but instead went with the alternate-reality flow and simply said, “Gosh, ma’am, I don’t know why they did it that way.”)

It’s not hard to understand why, beyond the financial straits we’re in –  “dire” is the only adjective “financial straits” is patterned to accept — transit is taking, and has taken, such hits. We’re still car-obsessed; people who ride the bus have little political clout; taxes? — No thanks.

Naysayers should visit Europe, or even an almost-foreign country, Canada, some day, and check out how easily and swiftly people get from there to way over there. They don’t ride around in ox carts; it does not look like “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” For all I know, you can even talk to the driver when the bus is in motion.

Arthur Salm is SDNN’s city columnist. Email: arthur.salm (at) sdnn.com

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Columns . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.