Los Angeles’ Metro may be a bigger boondoggle than the bullet train

A Los Angeles police officer is recovering from a broken leg, an injury sustained last Thursday night in an altercation with a homeless man who refused to leave a Metro train in North Hollywood. The officer was conducting an “end-of-the-line check” in an attempt to clear the train so the cars could be cleaned.

There, in one painful incident, is a picture of everything that is wrong with the Metro system. This is why the Metro budget is falling off a cliff.

Homeless individuals, some of them dangerous vagrants, are living in the train cars. This obviously contributes to a drop in ridership, an increase in security costs, and rising costs for what might delicately be called “sanitation.”

Metro’s ridership peaked in the 1980s when it was just a bus system. Thanks to four L.A. County sales tax increases of one-half percent each, sold to voters with a promise to improve traffic, Metro has spent billions to build a network of trains and subways that have become rolling drug dens and homeless encampments. Crime on Metro is a serious problem, and ridership on the trains is abysmally low. The overwhelming number of passengers on Metro are riding the buses.

Given the ridership disparities and the spending priorities, Metro may be a bigger boondoggle than the bullet train.

SCNG journalist Steve Scauzillo recently reported on Metro’s budget problems, challenging work given that Metro officials would not say what the total budget for Metro will be for the coming year, or what the transit system’s budget deficit would be. The new budget will be unveiled in May. The current budget is $9 billion.

The budget problem stems from the fact that Metro spends a lot more than it takes in. Operating costs are rising at a rate of 6.5%, while operating revenues and sales tax revenues are growing by only 2.6%.

Like every other enterprise in California, Metro faces higher labor costs, higher insurance premiums, and higher workers compensation expenses. In addition, Metro has to comply with a mandate to convert to all-electric buses by the end of 2030 at an estimated cost of $4.3 billion.

That’s bad enough, but then there are the other costs.

Over the last five years, Metro’s cleaning costs rose 8.5% per year due to homeless “habitation” and drug use on the trains. “Metro wants to limit growth in this area to 5.5%,” Scauzillo reported.

Is that enough? Or is that enough to make a potential transit rider take an Uber to the nearest used car lot?

Metro officials will soon hear a presentation on the feasibility of building their own in-house police department, or security force, or ambassadors of peace corps or whatever they’re planning to call it. How that will solve either the security or budget problem is difficult to see.

What’s easy to see is that hardly anybody wants to pay the fare to ride Metro. With a budget of $9 billion, the transit agency collected just $146.8 million in fare revenue. Compare that to the $367 million in sales tax dollars that went into Metro’s coffers, and you can see that everybody in L.A. County is being taken for a ride.

Metro also receives your state and federal tax dollars and some miscellaneous revenue from toll roads and other sources. But the costs are astronomical.

Leaving aside the cost of building the train lines, the cost of operating trains is far higher than running buses. Scauzillo reported that it costs 2.5 times more to operate a train for one hour than to operate a bus for the same amount of time. And the cost of operating the rail line expansions now under construction is projected to rise 28% per year between 2024 and 2029. Insurance is expected to rise 20% per year over the next five years, electricity costs are going up, and it costs more and more for parts and repairs.

According to Metro, the total ridership on the system in November 2023 was an estimated 24,218,275, but 19,171,550 of those riders were on buses. Only 5,046,725 were on trains.

No enterprise can be run this way.

For anyone on the Metro board thinking about another tax increase, don’t.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley