By Hector Gonzalez
Staff Writer

January 6, 2015--Although more than 50 percent of riders of the city’s Big Blue Buses are Latino, few Spanish speakers completed a recent online survey that officials will use to set future bus routes in the city, a BBB official said.

Riders’ responses to the online Expo Integration Plan route survey, which was presented to the Santa Monica City Council on Dec. 16, are a key part of the transit agency’s plans to integrate Big Blue Bus routes with Metro’s Expo Line once rail service begins at the end of this year, said Suja Lowenthal, transit government and community relations manager for the BBB.

“We have route proposals pretty much for every single route in the Big Blue Bus system, based on Expo stations opening,” Lowenthal said. “We’re proposing changes to our services so that we can better coordinate with Expo.”

As part of its planning, the bus service held several community meetings last year and added the online survey to its website. It received more than 12,000 individual responses, but “only got a very small number” from Spanish speakers, Lowenthal said.

“There was not as strong a response to the Spanish survey online as we would’ve hoped,” she said.

To “off-set” that lack of response, BBB officials sent surveyors to local senior centers and other places where Spanish speakers congregate to get their input, she said.

Although the bus line has no statistics on how many riders speak primarily Spanish, Latinos make up about 52 percent of its total ridership, followed by whites at 23 percent and African Americans at 13 percent. Asians make up about 12 percent of BBB riders, according to demographic information provided by the bus line.

Officials believe Spanish speakers may not have had ready access to a computer to complete the survey, or that perhaps English speakers in otherwise Spanish-speaking households completed the online survey for those households, Lowenthal said.

In any case, the low response from Spanish speakers won’t have a direct impact on which bus routes BBB officials ultimately present to the City Council later this year, Lowenthal said.

“If you and I ride the Rapid 10 from one end of the city to the other, our needs aren’t necessarily different based on the languages we speak,” she said. “It’s the destination that matters.”

But it was also important “to hear from a wide variety of folks about what the proposed changes would mean to their daily commute,” she added.
“One person’s daily commute doesn’t necessarily dictate the service for nearly 19 million people a year. But if you have thousands of responses that are the same, then it helps.”

Big Blue Bus officials now are looking at how they might improve future outreach efforts aimed at Spanish-speaking riders, she said.

“There are a lot of barriers which now we know we have to overcome,” Lowenthal said. “I think the better way, going forward, to try and reach constituents who may not be as comfortable with the computer or on the phone is to do on-board surveys. It’s a very candid way of doing surveying.”

In the past, Big Blue Bus officials have used on-board surveys to ask riders their opinions about certain changes, but the Expo Line integrated route survey was different, she said. It would have required surveying riders on “every single route” in the BBB’s 52-square-mile service area, she said.

“We did not do on-board surveys for Expo integration because it was such a large effort, and it was system-wide,” Lowenthal said. “Typically, when we do on-board surveys with actual surveyors it’s usually for a smaller population. It might be one route, or it might be a particular segment of one route where we’re trying to figure out how something impacts folks.”

Despite the low survey response from Spanish speakers, Lowenthal said the 12,000 responses received is a good sampling of BBB ridership needs. The responses, along with the input officials received from City Council members at their Dec. 16 meeting, will now be “fine tuned” to create a final set of bus route proposals, she added.

Those final route proposals will be presented to the City Council sometime in March, Lowenthal said.