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Why Are Bus Drivers Anxious?
This article about the death of a (Seattle-King County) Metro Transit driver is ostensibly about the anxiety of fellow transit operators at the death of one of their co-workers. The real subject is the source of that anxiety, which is described as an increasing number of “non-destinational riders”. How about that newly-created phrase! Metro Transit has always had a low-level problem with buses that go through downtown with homeless individuals on their buses, who simply ride around and never leave. Lately, with the Wuhan Coronavirus reducing ridership by orders of magnitude, coupled with the new policy of everyone riding free, has caused an explosion of literal “Free Riders” who camp out on the Metro buses.
Those drivers’ anxiety isn’t just about the possibility of contracting the disease, but also the behavior of the homeless bus-campers. The article also describes the “new normal” for the Seattle Navigation Team’s procedures for dealing with local homeless camps and campers. Camps are multiplying, and the existing ones are growing.
If you were looking for a reason to avoid Seattle, reasons are numerous in this article (as if you really needed any more reason).
Published in Domestic Policy
We’ve had a similar problem in Minneapolis-St. Paul for a long time with the light rail. The trains provide shelter for those who cannot comply with the rules in the homeless shelters, and thus there is a regular ridership of bums passed out and sprawling, not to mention the smell and the detritus of fluids (& solids) and needles. There is a fare system, but no physical controls so it’s easy for them to ride without having to pay. I don’t know, but have heard many times, that the homeless shelters were handing out transit passes as a means of encouraging this as alternative shelter. The city authorities encourage this also because the jurisdiction is transit police, not city. Finally, this past winter the local press finally started to cover this story since there was a rise in violent crimes and the drivers were taking their complaints to state legislators. Previously it was all “human-interest” type pablum – i.e. the heart of gold homeless lady who is nice to everyone.
I was a regular rider – I saw this stuff first hand.
The COVID situation has resulted in an increase in shelters (and I assume less rigid rules) and almost no train ridership – so, at least that part of the pandemic has worked out for us, “which is nice.”
Yet when the president suggests that it is time shut-down states be “liberated”, our idiot governor Inslee accuses him of “fomenting violence.”
If I hadn’t invested my entire adult life here in this adopted state of mine, I’d have ‘gone to Texas’ some time ago.
New York’s had the same problem, according to this report from WCBS — despite the photos of people jamming the trains, ridership’s down over 90 percent, and the homeless have taken advantage of the drop to basically move in and make the trains their own, much to the dismay of the train operators and conductors, who see this raising the odds they’re going to catch coronavirus (and where the weather’s now warming up, so the problem’s affecting even the lines that have long elevated sections — during the winter, the homeless prefer the handful of all-underground routes, because they’re not as cold when the train doors open).
I really enjoyed the trips to Seattle in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Sad to see what has happened to it.
It doesn’t help the bus drivers to know it, but really the homeless people have nowhere else to go. I know homeless people that had jobs, but those jobs are gone now. Most shelters and day centers no longer offer a place to rest during the day. Libraries closed, coffee shops, business lobbies closed. What are you to do with the legal command to “shelter-at-home” when you have no home? You’re right, those poor, poor bus drivers.
And now we hear from a Boston homeless shelter that 30% of the “patrons” have Wuhan Flu and nearly all have no symptoms. If I was driving a bus, all the windows would be open and I would be wearing a hazmat suit.
There might be an alternative, which might also work for airplane travel, in cases you aren’t required to talk. Maybe it wouldn’t work for a bus driver. But today wearing a respirator mask impairs your ability to talk anyway. The goal would be to accomplish effective respiratory filtration.
I spent a couple of weeks in Minneapolis-St. Paul on business, which meant I also spent a weekend there. One of the things I like to do in a city I explore is ride the mass transit even if I have a rental car.
I did so with the light rail, and I found that it was dominated by lower income people. Compare that with the mass transit in cities like New York and Washington, DC, I see an elite that established Minneapolis-St. Paul’s tram but doesn’t use it, and can’t get the middle class to use it either.
I used the tram during the day. I’d feel uneasy using it at night.
I saw a headline, but didn’t read the article, where a bus driver got in trouble for refusing to open the front door to his bus, but only the back door. I actually thought that was a reasonable precaution.