Bus strike means a hard road for the working poor - Their struggle to get to jobs underlines Orange County's disparities.
Before sunrise Monday, his job running a sewing machine on the line, bus rider Andy Lee had little choice but to start walking. The 40-year-old walked from Anaheim to Garden Grove. He walked for so long he stopped for breakfast. By 8 a.m., he had been walking for more than two hours -- with several miles still to go.
"Maybe I'll have to buy a bicycle," said an exasperated Lee, one of the thousands of desperate Orange County bus riders who responded to the first workday of the county's bus strike by carpooling, bicycling or begging for rides.
Though bus drivers, who are seeking higher wages, walked out Saturday, it took the workweek to begin for the strike to deliver its wallop. Folks struggled to commute. Workers scrambled to find rides. Sensing profit in some people's misfortune, enterprising motorists transformed their vans and trucks into bootleg taxicabs.
If anything, the bus strike, which shut down about 60% of the county's routes, highlighted Orange County's yawning gap between its wealthy and working class, between the haves and have-nots.
Many of the Orange County Transportation Authority's 225,000 daily riders are telemarketers, fast-food workers, maids, landscapers and machine operators trying to eke out a living in a county whose median home price in May -- $635,000 -- was the highest in Southern California.
Two-thirds of county bus riders are Latino, about one-fifth are white and 72% don't own a vehicle, according to a 2005 OCTA ridership survey. About half said they had annual household incomes of less than $20,000 -- about $45,000 below the county's median.
"Public transportation here is really a fringe element of society," said Paul Stowell, 44, who was heading to a job interview Monday on one of the few operating bus lines. "You have the poor, the handicapped and people who lost their license."
On Monday, transit and union officials both used the wage gap to jockey for the public's backing.
Just as an OCTA press release said the agency was trying to offset a "major disruption" in its riders' lives, union leadership countered with its own plea to the working poor:
"Currently, many drivers already qualify for housing assistance, and the board's current offer only makes matters worse. OCTA wants to create poverty wages that are not in par with the cost of living in the region."
