Snoble’s chance in hell

Credit: San Fernando Valley Transit Insider

KCBS-Channel 2/KCAL-Channel 9 reported that Metro chief executive officer Roger Snoble will stay with the agency for another two years.

He stays with a salary of over $300,000, and allowances for housing and automobile. The irony of the last perk is not lost on anyone.

Is Snoble worth the money?

That all depends on what metric is used to evaluate him. Much knowledge of management theory has focused on private, for-profit organizations, and in some unfortunate cases, management crossed over into cult appeal (see, for instance, Al Dunlap). Also, in public agencies, the director serves at the whim of an often disengaged elected body, and has to fall on his or her sword when a bureaucracy’s poor performance begins to affect election results. In effect, the director is judged on perceptions by a group of people who do not comprehend organizational workings themselves.

So, one approach to assess Snoble’s performance, while simple and cynical, is to see how many “good turns” Metro has while he was in charge.

Metro has many faults, too many to list here, but comparing the agency now to comparable periods in the past, the turnaround has been spectacular. The transit system, that seemed to wander like a zombie through the 1970s and 1980s, and did its worst to disgrace the county in the 1990s, is finally getting a lot of things right.

The old Southern California Rapid Transit District, which was formed originally to become a regional rail and bus company similar to BART in the Bay Area, ended up existing for much of its tenure without rail. The Blue Line and first segment of the Red Line opened near the final years of the RTD, which could not yet appreciate the resulting ridership gains.

The RTD also had the dubious distinction of losing ridership faster than population growth, and this was when the county was growing very fast. Much of the hits came from the other counties splitting away in the 1970s. That’s right, apart from the munis, the RTD was the only game in town. There was no Orange County Transit District (now Transit Authority), Omnitrans or Riverside Transit Agency. The rest, though, came from riders voting with their feet and abandoning the lousy service.

The 1980s saw the first major breakup of services within the county. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation picked up the downtown Mini-Ride services and some peak-hour routes, both of which grew to be DASH and Commuter Express. Also, County Supervisor Peter Schabarum did something more drastic in much of his district. He nabbed several RTD routes to create what is now Foothill Transit. The Foothill Transit zone created an unprecedented concept in transit, and is often incorrectly labeled as a “private” transit agency. Foothill is actually a “vapor entity,” where it only has fixed assets (buses and divisions) but zero employees. Every aspect of service is provided by contractors.

This was the period when Nick Patsaouras was in charge. His name is familiar mainly because of the bus plaza at Union Station being named after him, and that he was a one-time candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. Apart from that, he was not known for any initiatives that helped fix a moribund transit network.

The 1990s, though, seemed to indicate that it was only a matter of time before transit just faded away, but the agency was determined to go out kamikaze-style. A seemingly innocuous piece of legislation that took effect in 1993 opened the gates of hell in L.A. County. The state legislature merged operating agencies with transportation commissions in Santa Clara, Los Angeles and Orange Counties, creating transportation authorities.

The San Jose and Orange County mergers went off comparatively smooth, but few people knew of the acrimony that existed between the RTD and the county Transportation Commission. The partisans of both sides waged very ugly turf wars, and people began to pay attention. A lot of knowledgeable staff members ended up leaving, resulting in LACTC people trying to figure out how to operate service while RTD people grasping the mind-numbing aspects of transportation policy-making, especially since highways, bicycles and development were now involved.

Things avalanched from there. We saw the MTA move from Skid Row to a palatial tower in Union Station, still derided to this day as the Taj Mahal. Subway construction was so horribly managed that it was swallowing up all resources. The bus system was an afterthought, and the best MTA came up with was to get out of operations altogether and cobble together bus routes operated by munis and with the authority comping them.

The “rock bottom” year for MTA was 1994. The first strike since the 1970s occurred, the move to the Taj Mahal was completed, a failed General Motors organizer won the hearts and minds of long-suffering passengers with plans to improve bus service and Kill Whitey, but the end had arrived in the spring of that year. Just one year after the agency was formed, ominous announcements were placed in buses and trains that the MTA was in such financial straits that it was eliminating all night and weekend service, as well as all limited, express and special-event service. Had this actually have been approved, MTA might as well have concurrently drafted up plans for dissolution and liquidation.

MTA would see one of many bailouts, mainly relating to out-of-control Red Line construction cost overruns. That tense 1994 summer did not mark the point of turnaround. MTA was dropping every ball it was given. There was the quest to find a clean-burning fuel that resulted in many bus breakdowns. MTA made matters worse by blaming the breakdowns on the manufacturer, and burning the bridges of then the largest fleet supplier for the agency and the country. There was the rail car order that arrived over 5 years late. There was MTA getting into the bus research and development business, yielding a prototype that could never run. There was the time many rail projects were eliminated.

And, of course, the consent decree. As soon as it was signed, it looked like the biggest story of triumph since David beating Goliath. The reality reads more like “Frankenstein.” The consent decree gave the opportunity for riders and the bureaucracy to work together, but the organization didn’t care so much about improving service as instigating a revolution of the downtrodden proletariat.

In 1998 the voters gave MTA a swift kick in the nads with the passage of Proposition A, otherwise known as Zev’s Law. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, hoping to mount a campaign for L.A. mayor, initially wanted to repeal the county sales taxes to transit, hoping that this would starve the beast. He relented after pressure from surrounding cities who would have lost funding for their bus systems. Instead, it was focused to stopping subway construction, prohibiting local sales taxes to expand subway construction. The measure passed easily, not getting less than 66% of votes in any precinct. The MTA got whacked again, but the troubles were far from over.

MTA had seen its share of turnstile managers, from Franklin White to Joe Drew to Linda Bohlinger, who were consumed by the agency’s many troubles. For a while, the pursuit of a new agency head was fruitless, until Mayor Richard Riordan called in Julian Burke, a turnaround specialist for distressed corporations. During his tenure, MTA seemed to be screwing up less, but it was also an emphasis of completely disregarding major plans for the future.

All rail extensions were put on a holding pattern, but state legislators helped revive mothballed projects, including the Gold Line and the Orange Line busway.

The consent decree had also brought more buses to L.A., with little effectiveness, but planners beefed up the limited-stop and Rapid services to complement the grid.

Also, the turf wars have subsided considerably, and the many functions Metro carries out are getting more attention.

Overall, Metro is performing far better now than it has in a long time. Snoble came in on the reputation of making Dallas Area Rapid Transit from a moderate-size bus system to a multi-modal network that has impressed the otherwise restive Texans leery of transit and big gubmint.

Snoble also brought in a team of managers to help run the system better, including John Catoe of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus and OCTA as the Norm Chow to his Pete Carroll, so to speak. He also brought in Gerald Francis as a rail manager and Jack Gabig of Montebello Bus Lines as a manager of the new service sectors.

Relations have improved between MTA and other governmental agencies, and MTA and municipal operators are working closely now despite years of animosity. It was under his tenure that bus riders were able to get a bus pass good on the county’s important bus systems. The age of the bus fleet is younger, and bus and rail projects are slowly but surely expanding.

In this light, Roger Snoble has done a commendable job and Metro is better off for having him.

The LA Metro Mole disagrees, saying “Mr. Snoble, has demonstrated, publicly, his lack of fitness and lack of leadership for his position,” with a list of several faults.

And with perception being so important, he loses a great deal of credibility in the eyes of the public by taking an automobile allowance as a package deal. Looks bad, but not unfit to work. Stop and think for a second if he was forced to ride public transit, as the public seems to demand. And this accomplishes what exactly? With his $300,000-plus salary and housing allowance, in all likelihood he’ll live in one of those nice lofts in downtown L.A. and take the Red Line to the Taj Mahal. He’s riding, but a service that is both high-frequency and almost 100% reliable is the exception, not the rule, and that’s not an accurate picture of the system.

Then again, he may ride a bus and see what the service really looks like. And then what? Even as CEO, he is still a bureaucrat and cannot unilaterally demand any change he wishes. Not only that, but he will see the system through the eyes of a professional, not a bus rider. His first duty is to ensure the operation of the organization, not to please the rider. He could get on a bus that runs every half hour, and if it’s empty, he’ll demand that the service be cut to hourly or eliminated as an efficiency measure, just based on that one ride.

Does this make him cruel, callous or incompetent? No, because he is a product of a system that rewards results-getters and frowns upon compassion as a character flaw. Metro may be a monopoly that does not have to worry about making a profit, but the pressures and impulses are exactly the same for managers of a government entity or a Fortune 500 company. The playing fields are different, but the rules of the game are the same.

Whether Roger Snoble is a less-than-remarkable water-cooler dictator or a sharp tactician who was responsible for all of Metro’s recent good fortunes, the system has been running better now under his five-year tenure than it has in decades.

Keep up the great work.

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