Thread: TX Houston a hub for risky cross-border buses

Houston a hub for risky cross-border buses
Regulations lax for coaches
By JAMES PINKERTON and TERRI LANGFORD
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Dec. 21, 2008, 12:13PM

MONTERREY — The chilly overnight run from Houston to this industrial city in northern Mexico is one of dozens daily that carry passengers past a cactus and yucca-spangled plain.

For immigrants, it is essential and economical, a $43-means-of-travel in a home-spun industry largely created by Hispanics who arrived in the U.S. during an unprecedented wave of immigration over the last two decades.

But it can also be dangerous and deadly.

This vibrant cross-border transportation industry, which claims Houston as its headquarters, is fueled in part by inconsistent oversight and weak enforcement. A thinly stretched federal highway safety force has allowed a burgeoning transit network to arise nearly unabated, with many operators taking advantage of regulatory loopholes to import non-U.S.-certified buses from Mexico, a Chronicle review has found.

Bus companies can change their names and routes overnight, making safety statistics about the trans-border operators nearly impossible to monitor.

But a snapshot of the overall bus industry in Texas shows at least 250 people have died in crashes since 2000, including one accident in Sherman that killed 17 religious pilgrims from Houston and another in Victoria that killed one man and injured 46 others. Both bus companies had a history of safety, maintenance or regulatory problems.

John Hill, head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, acknowledges that the Victoria and Sherman crashes exposed the drawbacks of current regulations. The most critical shortcoming, he said, is that new bus companies are allowed to operate for up to 18 months before inspectors check their buses and drivers. Stiffer fines and improved bus safety features also are needed, Hill said.

"I don't think that new entrants to the bus (industry) should be allowed to operate until we physically visit them and get into their books," said Hill, whose agency is expected to monitor 575,000 commercial vehicles, including 3,900 tour buses.

The Houston bus industry draws on customers from cities in the Mexican heartland including San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas and Guanajuato who have settled in Houston, or moved on to labor-strapped markets to the north. They rely on dirt-cheap fares to take them to jobs as diverse as canning tomatoes in Florida, picking onions in Georgia, or assembling furniture and weaving fabric in the Carolinas.


Houston connection
From his office in Washington, Hill said the charter bus industry has changed dramatically from a handful of large companies responsible for most of the routes to one shared with a number of new, smaller ones.

"People have figured out ways to make money and do it differently than people have done in the past," Hill said.

But in this network of smaller operators, Texas-to-Mexico routes have emerged, and many are served by companies formed by Houston immigrants. Among the owners are bus drivers from Mexico with limited cash, who then started buying used buses.

Some left previous occupations as cooks, metal workers, and flea market salesmen.

''The government has to figure out a better way of identifying and watching these companies, from a safety perspective, than they've done in the past," said Dallas attorney Brigham A. McCown, former general counsel for the FMCSA. ''They don't hear about these companies until something happens."

Carlos Matamoros, director of sales and terminal operations for El Expresso, a Houston subsidiary of tour bus leader Coach America, estimates 800 Houston residents board buses to Monterrey each day, some operated by companies with substandard equipment and poorly monitored drivers.

''They're just trying to make money quick, they know people want to travel," Matamoros said.

McCown termed FMCSA's task of regulating trucks and buses a ''daunting, monumental task, '' given the disparities in federal transportation resources. There are some 4,100 inspectors with the FAA who regulate 114 commercial airlines and 700,000 pilots, McCown notes, while the FMSCA has 148 inspectors to monitor 575,000 bus and trucking companies and 7 million commercial drivers.

A lack of permanent inspection facilities and insufficient staffing of inspectors in Laredo, a key Texas-Mexico bus entry point also has compromised efforts to detect unsafe buses entering the the state. Furthermore, the federal regulatory framework is geared toward enforcement of larger operators such as Greyhound, and not smaller, mom-and-pops.

''They don't buy TV airtime, they're not on the federal radar scope," McCown explained. ''The profit margins are pretty slim, and these companies aren't highly capitalized, so it's not surprising that some of these companies cut corners."

In Houston, many immigrants say they select bus operators that have stops close to their homes and are inexpensive, charging less than half the fare of large nationwide carriers.

''The government should have better control of public transportation, because if they don't check how these vehicles are operating there are going to be more accidents,'' said Zulema Villarreal, 53, who suffered extensive injuries in the fatal Victoria Jan. 2 accident as she and her three children returned to Houston from a family funeral in Monterrey.


Fatalities, investigations
Without financial backing and management expertise, these stories of hard-working immigrants starting their own transportation companies have had tragic endings when unsafe buses, or impaired drivers, are involved in fatal accidents, here and in Mexico.

A number of fatal crashes this year by marginal operators forced state and federal safety officials to contend with a poorly regulated segment of the industry that operates largely under the radar.

In August, after a Houston tour bus crashed and killed 17 Vietnamese church members in Sherman, U.S. transportation officials temporarily halted licensing new bus operators. The same month, Texas Department of Transportation announced it was checking to see how many of the 201 bus operators who had closed were still operating under a different name.

In the Sherman crash, investigators determined that a retreaded tire on the steering axle had blown, causing the bus to careen off a highway bridge. Retreaded tires are not allowed to be mounted on the front of a passenger bus.

Angel de La Torre, a Mexican immigrant who owns Iguala BusMex on Telephone Road, said he bought the used bus the month before the accident and the retreaded tire already was installed.

''I can't bring those dead people back, I'm sorry for that," de la Torre told the Chronicle. ''It was an accident, and I don't know what happened."

Federal and state authorities are considering criminal charges against de La Torre. Investigators discovered Iguala BusMex was created three weeks after his previous company, Angel Tours, was shut down because of safety problems.

The new company did not have the required $5 million insurance coverage, nor was it permitted to travel outside the state.

''In all the years I've been in business, no one got hurt on my buses. I've kept my buses in good shape all the time," insists de La Torre.

Some of the operators transporting Houston immigrants don't even have a terminal.

After dark, and long after closing time, a modest taqueria on Telephone Road becomes one of the hottest bus stops in Houston. When a Dallas-based bus company, which has operated under three different names, was shut down for safety problems, others quickly took over the well-known location.

Another crash earlier this year uncovered further weaknesses in federal oversight.

On Jan. 2, the fatal crash in Victoria exposed a loophole that allowed companies to import Mexican buses not certified for use on U.S. highways. The fatal rollover, apparently caused by a sleepy driver's oversteering, showed the failure of federal regulators to monitor this massive Texas-to-Mexico market.

The Mexican-made 2005 Volvo bus owned by Capricorn Bus Lines of Houston had been leased to another Houston bus company owned by a Mexican immigrant. That woman obtained a U.S. Department of Transportation tour bus license despite having no prior experience and no capital.

How this bus made it into the country in the first place became the National Transportation Safety Board's central focus, and the probe revealed how immigrant bus companies had gained such quick footing in the United States.

NTSB discovered that small Texas-to-Mexico bus charters, using lax registration regulations in California, circumvented federal import regulations to bring cheaper buses into Texas that were not made to U.S. specifications. Owners of the bus firms quickly learned that although Texas required a title of ownership to obtain a new license plate, California did not.


Hard to pin them down
Once a California plate was obtained, bus firms then traded their California plates for Texas ones.

Since the Victoria crash and the NTSB investigation, the Texas Department of Transportation has found that Capricorn and at least 22 other bus lines used this method to "legally" register for license plates for their buses.

There could be more.

''I think even after a period of time we're still not sure what the extent of the problem is,'' said Debbie Hersman, the NTSB board member who led the public inquiry into how the Capricorn bus made it to Texas.

Detecting Mexican buses as they cross the Texas-Mexico border is a challenge. At Laredo, the largest inland port on the border, there are only enough inspectors to conduct random checks of entering buses.

Fourteen years after NAFTA, there is still not a permanent inspection station at the Lincoln-Juarez bridge in Laredo.

The downtown bridge is the only one of the city's five international crossings where tour buses from Mexico are allowed to enter. More than 40,000 buses crossed in the latest fiscal year, yet there is no designated inspection area for them in the crowded port of entry. Passengers are checked for immigration papers.

''It would help out a whole lot if it was an actual facility where the equipment we needed was in one area," acknowledged DPS officer Ramon Farias, with the commercial vehicle enforcement division.

In a deposition earlier this year, the owner of the bus that crashed in Victoria said it was simple to cross without proper documents: ''We were coming through and crossing over on the border and where DOT does an inspection ... and they've let, let it pass across. Then I don't know why, but they have let it, let us operate."

In 2007, there were 265,000 bus crossings into this country along the U.S.-Mexico border, and only 13,000 inspections were conducted.

Hill, the FMCSA administrator, admits his agency is hampered by a meager inspection staff, noting there are only 148 on the job nationwide, most of them in Texas. The agency does give more than half of its $530 million budget to states to conduct roadside inspections of trucks and buses.

Meanwhile, cross-border transportation continues to rise as Houston's immigrant populations grows.

A recent passenger on the Monterrey to Houston bus trip was Ernesto Alvarez, 43, who buys used cars but dreams of owning a bus company.

"I was talking to a friend about starting a company," Alvarez said. "There is a lot of demand for bus service."

james.pinkerton@chron.com

terri.langford@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hea ... 75777.html

BUS DANGERS

The Chronicle reviewed inspection records and safety data from the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Texas Department of Public Safety for all buses and found:
250 deaths in at least 176 Texas bus crashes since 2000.

41 Houston residents died in three accidents in last three years.

13,879 injuries in 6,157 crashes.

10,000 violations among 670 companies during inspections by state troopers since 2005.

580 vehicles and more than 240 drivers were deemed unsafe since 2005 and temporarily taken off the road.

*Note: These numbers reflect accidents mostly involving charter buses, but do not pinpoint how many travel into and out of Mexico.

I love the idea that Mexican trucks, fully loaded with drugs, illegals and hot peppers may be on the road behind me and may not be able to stop because they blew a retread tire. GWB, with this globalism drive putting American lives at risk in our own country, reducing funding for those agencies that are supposed to keep us safe, should be tried for treason.