A Bus Driver’s Life Is Worth $16,200

The state of California has fined the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) $16,200 for health and safety violations that may have led to the death of a bus driver, Audrey Lopez, from coronavirus last October. The state claims VTA failed to “require or ensure the use of face coverings at all times by employees at the facility and while operating the buses.” It also didn’t provide effective training instruction to employees on how to prevent the spread of the virus.

Naturally, VTA claims that Lopez didn’t catch the virus while on the job. But union president John Courtney says that Lopez had not been anywhere where she would have been exposed to the virus, other than work, in the days before she called in sick.

The transit industry insists that transit is safe to ride during the pandemic. However, the Centers for Disease Control says that air filtration systems must have a minimum efficiency reporting value (MERV) rating of 13 to filter out the virus. The filters used in VTA buses are rated 4, good enough to filter out pollen but not good enough to stop the virus.

No doubt this fine, as trivial as it is, will contribute to the debate over VTA’s board of directors. A bill has been introduced in the California legislature to replace the current board, which presently consists of 15 city councillors and 3 county supervisors, with a seven-member board, none of whom are elected officials. The current board, critics say, is more interested in bringing federal and state rail transit dollars into board members’ cities than in providing efficient and safe transit service. One result is that VTA is financially the worst-performing transit agency in the Bay Area, earning just 7 percent of its operating costs in fare revenues.

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Changing the board won’t change the fact that Congress encourages transit agencies to pick the most-expensive options in any corridor, or the fact that Congress is lately rewarding agencies for not carrying passengers. Basically, as I’ve noted before, the transit industry is shielded from any pressures to be efficient, to innovate, or to actually serve rider needs.

VTA is not the worst performing agency in a terrible industry. But considering it serves one of the wealthiest urban areas in the world and one that has the third highest population density in the United States, you’d think it could do a lot better that cover just 9.1 percent of its operating costs with fares, attract an average of more than 8.6 passengers on its 40-seat buses, and more than 14 passengers on its 65-seat light-rail cars, but that’s all that it did before the pandemic.

As of January, 2021, VTA has lost 70 percent of its riders compared with January 2020, so its performance is worse than ever. Maybe changing the board will bring in people willing to question the assumption that expensive rail transit is the best solution for an area whose population density may be high but whose downtown has less than 3 percent of the region’s jobs.