WASHINGTON -- The nine-month old federal charter service rule that limits the type of charters public transit agencies are allowed to provide may finally be taking hold.

Thats how things appear to be trending as more and more transit officials begin cooperating with private motorcoach companies rather than face formal complaints for violating the rule.

Ken Presley, vice president of industrial relations for the United Motorcoach Association, said that many transit systems are not only voluntarily complying with the regulation but are even responding positively when told of possible violations that they might be committing.

This is in sharp contrast to the first few months after the rule became effective when transit agencies were flooding the Federal Transit Administration with requests for exemptions to the rule, and private operators were regularly calling on federal regulators to stop transit officials from looking for potential loopholes in the rule or ignoring it altogether.

Presley cited two recent examples in which transit agencies reacted quickly and favorably when it was pointed out that the official notifications of charter work they presented to private companies contained proposed fares in violation of the charter rule.

He said Paducah (Ky.) Area Transit and city transportation officials in Lodi, Calif., immediately revised their notices and re-published them without listing the fare information.

"I was mistaken in including that information for those types of notices," acknowledged Lew Jetton of Paducah Area Transit. "In the future, I will leave it off the charter notices."

Presley suggested that listing an expected fare in a charter notice likely much lower than what actually would be charged could keep some private operators from bidding for the work.

"We just do not want the private charter operators to be discouraged or create unrealistic expectations," he said.

The FTA also says it has seen a gradual shift toward cooperation as well.

Although specific statistics are not available, federal regulators say there has been a noticeable drop in the number of questions and advisory opinions they are getting from both transit agencies and private charter companies.

"Things are slowing down all the way around," observed Linda Lasley, assistant chief counsel at the FTA. "It looks like were getting into the calm where theyre starting to say that the rule isnt so bad after all."

Meantime, private operators say theyre even getting some help from transit officials, including advice and other information about charters that the transit agencies were doing before the charter rule took effect. Also, some private operators are even subcontracting a portion of the new work to transit agencies.

Randy Ingram of Premier Coach in Knoxville, Tenn., said officials of the Knoxville Transit Authority were helpful to him after he won a contract to handle shuttles for a major conference on the campus of the University of Tennessee in August.

"They were very cooperative," he said. "In the past it was a job that they would have done but they stepped aside and we did the work."

The contract involved the use of six coaches to shuttle hundreds of people during the five days of meetings.

Ingram said he expects to get even more charters from the transit agency because it had been doing a substantial amount of transportation work for the university and most of those jobs are likely to be offered to private bus companies in the future.

And John Miller, president of Miller Transportation in Louisville, Ky., took cooperation a step further when he landed a contract to operate shuttles for several major sporting events, including the Kentucky Derby and the Indianapolis 500.

He shared some of the specialty shuttle work he was unable to handle with transit agencies, which in the past had been doing all of the work.

Despite the move toward cooperation, not everyone has gotten the message, and the FTA has responded forcibly.

Acting on concerns raised by private charter carriers, the FTA in October found that two public transit agencies were operating charters in violation of the charter service rule and ordered both to stop the operations.

At about the same time, the FTA removed the name of a private charter company from the official list of registered operators for three months after a transit agency complained that the operator did not act in good faith in negotiating for a charter job.