More Study Needed on Super Transit Agency

Bus service in Orange County has never been better. Ridership is up 15% over last year and it looks as though the Orange Country Transit District will carry nearly 40 million passengers before the current fiscal year is out. So naturally there is a move afoot to make the district quit while it’s ahead. The county needs to think about that one.

Quitting while they’re ahead would take the form of creating a super transit agency out of three existing operations. One is the district. A second is the the Orange County Transportation Commission, which does planning, funnels state and federal money to operating agencies and coordinates improvements in service. The third is the Consolidated Transportation Service Agency, which provides special bus services for the elderly and disabled.

That may be the right thing to do, although evidence does crop up now and then that bigger is not always better. The basic problem is that nobody has persuasive data on what the merger would cost or how a new agency would operate more efficiently. These are not guaranteed outcomes and deserve more study and less blind faith. For example, is there a lesson for the county in the fact that since Santa Clara County merged its public transportation systems its hourly cost for a bus in service is higher than the cost here, and that administrative costs also are higher than the Orange County Transit District? That’s one of many things that should be checked out before the concept is taken further.

The idea, again without much detail, is embodied in a bill sponsored by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) that comes up at a Senate Transportation Committee hearing Tuesday. There clearly are enough expressions of concern about the bill to justify Bergeson’s asking for a year’s delay on her bill or the committee’s finding on its own that delay is justified.

For example, the Orange County division of the League of California Cities has voted overwhelmingly for a year’s delay. An Ad Hoc Committee on Transportation Agency Consolidation, created by the transportation commission, declined to go along with the call for a delay. But it did ask Bergeson to amend the bill to require formal approval by Orange County and by cities representing 50.1% of the county’s population before consolidation could go through.

In their present frame of mind, the cities would clearly block a merger if the bill was to go through with that amendment. That would seem to be the most persuasive argument of all in favor of Bergeson’s putting the super agency on hold for long enough to get a thorough study of the proposal.