The Los Angeles Bus Riders Union

In 1992 a diverse group of bus riding people in Los Angeles, California and the surrounding area organized themselves in an attempt to secure fair transportation access for themselves and their communities. Their chief protest was that the public transit service in the Los Angeles area, LACMTA (The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority), was providing better services to those populations that were wealthier and whiter than the average bus rider in Los Angeles at the time. Namely, the city’s plan to install new rapid transit trains between Los Angeles Suburbs and the business-oriented downtown. For more information on how this group gathered together such a diverse community, you can visit their website. Plans for suburban commuters were a stark contrast to what urban bus riders saw: overcrowded buses that they were paying too much for.

The riders eventually formally organized into the BRU, the Bus Riders Union, in 1992. The organization is also known by other initialisms for those union members who speak languages other than English. Their largest protest came in 1994, when they sued LACMTA for infringing upon the civil rights of riders in Los Angeles who were predominantly African-American, Hispanic, and Korean. The ensuing settlement legally required LACMTA to update and improve its services to inner city riders before going ahead with its expanded light rail service. After successfully championing their case in the media and with an October 5^th, 1996 rally and protest, the case was settled out of court in what is known as a consent decree. This bound the public transportation service to abandon its plans for a light rail service to predominantly white suburbs like Pasadena until it revamped the inner-city busing system. The settlement also included very specific pricing points for new monthly passes and fare increase limits for the coming years. LACMTA settled because they were aware that they would lose the civil rights suit as it could be proven that resources were not being evenly distributed. This is an interesting civil rights case in that the decision to install light rail lines was not intentionally racist or discriminatory, but harmed Los Angeles’ most vulnerable populations disproportionately.

 

Logo of the Bus Riders Union, courtesy of their website.

 The movement itself was formed by people who simply felt forgotten by the political and economic system who were able to come together and rise up to create something much larger than the sum of their parts. In an area like Los Angeles County, enough different groups of people utilize mass transit that people were able to join in the movement from all walks of life, all with their own interests, frustrations, and vision. Because of this diversity of opinion, the BRU also won in their lawsuit an advisory role in the future of the Los Angeles mass transit system. Not only was there one successful lawsuit, but a portion of the process by which policy is made was put back into the hands of ordinary, daily riders. This protest is proof that even when circumstances aren’t as obvious as other protests, lasting change can be made by any group who is willing to stand up for their legal rights. When so many things seem controlled by unfeeling private forces, it is encouraging to hear about a group of people who worked to make a system better for all those involved.