Overview and History

The Bus Riders Union/Sindicato de Pasajeros (BRU/SDP) is a multiracial, working-class based membership organization operating at the intersection of mass transit, the environment and public health, and civil rights. The BRU/SDP was initiated in 1992 as the Labor/Community Strategy Center's Transportation Policy Group and soon began organizing bus riders in the “Billions for Buses” campaign to confront and defeat the transit racism reflected in the policies of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). From 1994 to the present, the BRU has grown rapidly, and now, with over 3,000 dues-paying members and 50,000 self-identified members on the buses, it is the nation's largest grassroots mass transit advocacy organization. BRU membership and leadership are predominantly people of color and over half are women.

Since late 1996, the BRU has had a formidable obligation—as the court-appointed class representative in the civil rights Consent Decree settlement won in October 1996 in the case of Labor/Community Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union et al. v. Los Angeles County MTA. The Bus Riders Union now has the political and legal responsibility to represent the civil rights of 400,000 daily bus riders in Los Angeles County—88% of whom are Latino, Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Native American, more than 50% of whom have annual family incomes under $12,000 and 57% of whom are women. The BRU is working to maintain our political and legal responsibility as class representative of L.A.'s bus riders for the life of the Consent Decree, while expanding a social movement at the same time.

We are working to write a new chapter in the civil rights and environmental justice movement—a grassroots group that wins a well-known civil rights suit, but then has the guts and commitment to enforce its provisions for a decade to build a clean-fuel, world-class mass transportation system in the most air polluted and auto-dominated city in the U.S. which, until we arrived on the scene, had the worst mass transit and bus system of any major U.S. city.

Demands of the BRU’s Billions for Buses, Fight Transit Racism Campaign include:

• $20 Monthly Bus Pass

• 50-cent Fare with Free Transfer

• 4,000 Clean Fuel Bus Fleet

• Freeze on Rail Spending

• Full Implementation of civil rights Consent Decree (this includes the immediate purchase and operation of at least 250 buses to reduce overcrowding and 600 expansion buses for county-wide new service to schools, hospitals, jobs and recreation)

• $10 Student Bus Pass Sold at Schools (K-12, College, and Adult School)