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# Libi Warren Santa Monica Fare increase is not fair
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/libi-warren-santa-monica-fare-increase-is-not-fair/
- Published: 2002-04-25T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T00:15:19.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import

*By Rufus Baker Santa Monica*

Dear Editor: Now is not the time for the city of Santa Monica to even consider granting a fare increase to the once-excellent Big Blue Bus.

Instead, the focus should be on issuing credits, rebates or a temporary fare reduction to the many thousands of riders, especially seniors and the handicapped, who have been for the past year grossly inconvenienced or prevented from even riding because of the Big Blue Bus’s arbitrary and ill-conceived, daily, unannounced route changes and elimination of many major route stops and connection points.

Some of these haphazard bus re-routings stem from the ongoing construction in downtown Santa Monica, which as a long-term project surely could have been addressed in a more coherent fashion.

Other changes, such as the bus company’s troubling shift of Line 9 away from the downtown area, reflect Big Blue Bus’s lack of concern for its riders.

Over the past 43 years, I’ve often used Santa Monica’s buses and found them to be quite reliable. These days, I have a car and rarely ride Big Blue.

However, my senior, handicapped mother does not drive and tells me horror stories daily of her anguish in trying to accomplish simple tasks by bus because she doesn’t know from one day to the next where it will stop, which street it will take, or where connections can be made.

Although she lives adjacent to Line 3 stop north of Wilshire Boulevard, she has learned to travel in opposite directions to her usual routes. For example, she now patronizes the Pacific Palisades Post Office, not Santa Monica’s; she shops at the Rancho Park Trader Joe’s, not Santa Monica’s, to avoid the uncertainty and serious inconvenience of taking the bus into her own downtown.

Hardly selling points for a bus company that wants to earn a fare increase! With more construction yet to come, the Big Blue Bus should be planning better to avoid such wanton destruction of its riders’ lives and should retract its request for a fare increase in favor of a program of credits and reduced prices to compensate for its massive mistakes that are resulting in such poor customer service.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 25, 2002.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/042502.pdf?ref=smdp.com)