Metro to hire 10 more supervisors in response to L.A.'s poor on-time bus rating

Thirty minutes. Forty minutes. Still no bus.

"At night, it's very dangerous," said Casileo, who is 52 and has been riding Metro buses for 15 years. "I was just hoping the bus would come."

It did -- eventually.

Casileo isn't the only frustrated passenger. Metro buses in Los Angeles are on time only 63% of the time, the lowest performance rate among 10 major metropolitan areas, according to a recent survey.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority surveyed transit agencies in nine other regions -- including New York, Chicago and Boston -- and found the average on-time performance of their buses was 79%.

Metro's on-time performance has continued to decline even as its fleet expanded, according to the survey, conducted in 2007 using data from the previous two years. Since 2005, the MTA has added 53 buses, but its on-time performance has dropped 4 percentage points.

"I'm always waiting. Always," said Sandra Quintana at a bus stop Wednesday morning at Vermont and Slauson avenues. Quintana, 23 and a lifelong bus rider, said buses usually arrive 10 to 15 minutes late, especially in East Los Angeles.

Metro tracks timeliness at about 20,000 bus stops in Los Angeles, but because on-time performance varies by stop or line, it is unable to determine the average wait time, said Carolyn Flowers, Metro's chief operations officer.

MTA officials said the decline in on-time performance cannot be attributed to any one factor, but they note that staffing has not kept up with the growth in service.

For a decade beginning in 1996, MTA spent more than $1 billion to buy buses, add service and cap fares under a consent decree to settle a civil rights lawsuit with bus riders. Though Metro has 147 more buses and 1 million more hours of service today than it did in 1996, the number of vehicle operations supervisors has remained almost stagnant, at about 60.

The survey reports that the ratio of supervisors to the number of buses, miles traveled and hours of service are each almost three times greater than those of the average metropolitan area surveyed.

A supervisor in Los Angeles oversees an average of 38.61 buses, nearly 1.4 million revenue vehicle miles and 113,000 service hours per year, whereas supervisors surveyed in the other regions on average each oversee 14.8 buses, 409,000 revenue vehicle miles and 40,000 hours per year.