After 14 Months, Success Is Uneven for MAX Bus Lines : Transportation: Some Municipal Area Express lines have more than enough passengers; others go nearly empty.

MAX is experiencing growing pains.

After 14 months of service, the Municipal Area Express commuter bus service is caught in a feast-or-famine scenario, with buses on one route offering standing room only while buses on another route are running three-quarters empty.

“We did not expect this imbalance,” said John E. Wills, program administrative assistant for MAX, a joint project of Los Angeles County and nine South Bay cities.

Since its inception in April, 1990, MAX has been transporting aerospace employees and other commuters north in the mornings and south in the afternoons.

As it enters its second year, the fledging bus system has changed commuting habits of hundreds of South Bay residents. The latest ridership figures show that between 2,100 and 2,700 riders have been boarding MAX buses weekly in 1991. Wills said MAX met its goal of running at 50% of capacity or higher systemwide after the first year.

But officials want to attract more riders.

What MAX needs is more hard-core bus commuters like Timothy Towne, who began using the San Pedro line last summer. In February, Towne took a radical step--especially by California standards--and sold his Honda Civic. He now shares his wife’s car and he estimates he is saving $5,000 a year in car payments, insurance and gasoline, as well as wear and tear on his nerves.

“I have a high-stress job, anyway, so I don’t need to get back in my car for more stress,” said Towne, 30, a graphics coordinator at Aerospace Corp., as he rode the 6:30 a.m. MAX bus out of San Pedro.

Most passengers interviewed aboard buses recently praised MAX, saying they have grown dependent on the bus system with its blue-and-purple logo, friendly drivers and reclining airline-style seats. They cited the buses’ cleanliness, the relaxed atmosphere and the general punctuality of buses.

Some MAX stalwarts have even turned the name into a verb: “I’m not MAXing today. I MAX part time.”

But most Los Angeles area residents are not so quick to trade in the independence of car commuting for bus travel.

The major hurdle is “the romance people have with their cars,” said Gene Monreal, commuter services administrator at Torrance-based AiResearch, a division of Allied-Signal Aerospace Co. “Some of these guys were conceived in their car, and will probably die in their car, because they live in their car,” Monreal said.

MAX promoters are targeting such car aficionados. MAX newsletters are delivered regularly to aerospace employees. A cable-television commercial touting the bus line ran in Rancho Palos Verdes.

System operators even gave away free rides to mark the line’s one-year anniversary in April. But they were mortified when the festivities were marred when five out of 18 buses broke down on the same morning.

“It’s kind of like all the stats catching up with you at once,” Wills said. During May, he said, no breakdowns were reported.

The second-year budget for the MAX system is $1,131,243 of which $180,900 is expected to come from fares. Of the remaining funding, 40% is supplied by a grant from the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the rest from local cities based on the number of passengers from each city and miles traveled within each city. The system employs 25 drivers.

Fashioned primarily for aerospace employees, MAX provides one-way morning service to El Segundo and designated stops in between, and one-way return service to the southern suburbs in the afternoons.

Line 1 cuts north through the beach cities of Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach. Line 2 wends its way across the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and Line 3 shoots northward from San Pedro and Torrance. The fare is $1.25 on the beach cities route and $1.25 or $1.50 on the other two routes, depending on the distance traveled.

Ridership on the San Pedro buses one week in late May soared as high as 83%, far above the 50% goal set by MAX officials, but the beach cities route was downright anemic, running at only 20% of capacity. The drastic fluctuation in passenger levels on the different routes caught planners off guard, and they are considering adding buses to the San Pedro route.

“We’d still have to get the buses from somewhere, and the most obvious place would be Line 1,” Wills said of the beach cities route. But operators are fearful of what would result if they pulled some buses from the beach cities--in effect, cannibalizing MAX by having one route feed on another. Wills said that would be done as a last resort, because it could further weaken Line 1.

No commuters were aboard one Line 1 bus when it departed at 7:40 a.m. on a recent day from its first stop at Palos Verdes Boulevard and Calle Miramar.

Only seven commuters would board this bus. One of them, Karen Schreiman, 34, of Redondo Beach, said she takes MAX about once a month to her job as a financial analyst at Hughes Aircraft Co. She normally drives to work during the winter months.

“I don’t like waiting out in the cold,” Schreiman said. “I don’t know how people take the bus on the East Coast.”

But Schreiman, like others, gave MAX high ratings. “I’d be a little bit scared taking the RTD,” Schreiman said. “I feel real safe on this. And, it’s clean.”

Bus driver Kenneth Marshall, 52, of Long Beach said MAX offers a more personal atmosphere than RTD. “You see the same people every day,” he said.

In an attempt to attract more TRW workers, MAX planners changed the Line 1 route in mid-December. Buses arriving at El Segundo now stop first at the TRW complex near Manhattan Beach and Aviation boulevards. The change was expected to double the number of passengers on the line.

Instead, ridership remained flat. Some employees of the El Segundo-based Hughes now complain that their commutes were lengthened by the change.

By contrast, a Line 3 bus filled quickly after it left its first stop at 6:30 a.m. on another day and glided past fog-shrouded palms along deserted San Pedro streets. A second bus was added in Torrance to handle the overflow.

The ride took 90 minutes, from start to finish, but several passengers said they didn’t mind. Steve Friske, 38, of San Pedro, spent much of the trip buried in “RN: Memoirs of Richard Nixon.” He averages 50 pages of reading per trip.

Mike Gustchen, 40, of San Pedro, who at 8 a.m. was the last passenger to leave the bus, said he uses his 75-minute ride to sleep.

“Most of the passengers, once they get used to a driver, just get on and go to sleep,” said bus driver, Viola Keith, 49, of Long Beach.

Passengers are not the only ones who are pleased with MAX’s track record.

“Overall, TRW is very satisfied with the MAX bus system,” said John Booth, spokesman for TRW Space & Defense Sector in Redondo Beach. Booth rides Line 3 three days a week.

“You feel you can really stand behind it and promote it,” said Irv Jones, supervisor of travel and commuter services for Aerospace Corp.

In a recent Aerospace Corp. survey of its MAX riders, most rated the system’s features as “good” or “excellent.” The highest marks went to bus-stop locations, the lowest to “overall vehicle comfort.” Some seats are too close together for adequate leg room, Jones explained.

At AiResearch in Torrance, only about 20 of the more than 3,200 employees are taking MAX regularly. Those employees say they like the system--”we can’t say enough good things about it,” Monreal said--but the afternoon buses do not start early enough to serve the AiResearch production shift that leaves work at 2:30 p.m.

Several San Pedro passengers said they would like to see more buses more frequently on Line 3--perhaps arriving every 10 minutes instead of 20--as well as express buses that would pick up people at the Air Force housing complex at the route’s start and then skip many intermediate stops and speed north on the freeways. Planners are now studying both ideas, Wills said.

Passengers say the line’s management appears to be open to suggestions--and criticisms.

When Towne’s bus failed to arrive one morning this spring, he quickly contacted MAX coordinators to complain. He was impressed when a MAX representative called back to ask him questions about the foul-up.

“They’re constantly trying to improve things,” Towne said. “I hope it stays. I hope it gets better.”

MAX Ridership Ridership for the Municipal Area Express commuter bus service is boom or bust, with buses on one route running at or near capacity while others are three-quarters empty. Here are monthly ridership figures for the three lines from August, 1990, through May of this year, with figures showing percent of capacity.

Line 1 Line 2 Line 3 August, 1990 19.5% 44.0% 85.0% September 20.7 47.9 82.4 October 25.9 52.1 89.6 November 24.0 52.7 81.0 December 15.6 36.5 72.4 January, 1991 18.7 38.7 76.2 February 20.5 40.2 73.7 March 19.8 33.8 69.3 April 26.2 53.9 81.9 May 23.9 52.7 79.4