Hazards of the Road

On the No. 70 Grand bus—the busiest by far, with about 9,000 boardings a day—people lucky enough to get a seat ride in a daze, lulled into the weird passivity of being transported. But as their stop approaches, they snap into tense vigilance, craning forward, then rise and push past people grabbing posts and straps. “Back door!” a woman holding a baby carrier in front of her yells at the top of her lungs. The door’s shutting and people aren’t getting out of her way. 

A silver-haired man as fine-boned as Nat King Cole, wearing a pale-blue shirt embroidered “Maintenance,” talks about Channel 9. A thickset middle-aged woman with a face that’s seen no coddling wears a T-shirt that reads, “I’m not mean. I just don’t like you.” A little girl and her mother make their way to the back, the child using seated passengers’ shoulders to keep her balance. A man follows, muttering, “Don’t make no goddamned difference who gets on the bus first. Everybody’s gettin’ on.” 

To my right, two men talk quietly. I catch snatches: “Go ballistic on you… Everybody’s so mad all the time.” Up front, a teenager with the blurred features of cognitive deficit naps, her head slumped. An old man boards, toothless but dapper in a straw fedora, his maroon striped shirt crisp, his brown jacket now baggy. A young man feeds coins into the fare box, legs spraddled for balance as the bus heaves. His T-shirt is stretched over a humped back, and a cardboard sign telling the world he’s homeless and hungry is tucked under his arm. As we roll north, he rests his head on his friend’s shoulder, heedless of her hot-pink bra strap, dozing like a little boy. 

Past the Grand water tower, the bus starts to empty; by Broadway, only a few people are left. But the return bus fills fast. One young man gets on and sees somebody he knows: “What’s up, brother?” They chat a bit. “I’m trying to round all the brothers up for that rally,” he says. His friend—early thirties, maybe—has a slow smile, the kind that makes it clear that he means it. One eye is clouded, the iris floating out of sight. “Obviously there is no hope for this generation,” he says. “That’s why it’s chaos.” A minute later, he sighs. “My cousins got killed like that, spent a lot of time around the wrong people.” The first guy nods. “They don’t return from that, you know what I mean? They have no spiritual teaching.”

Near the faded Mother’s Fish sign, a young man in a bright turquoise T-shirt rushes to catch the bus, tossing away his cigarette as he runs. Fumbling in his pockets, he hands over a crumpled piece of paper and says, “I’m sorry,” sits down, and frantically pulls everything out of his pockets. Then he gives up and throws his head back, looking like a black Jesus, high-cheekboned and beautiful, his mouth open in silent agony. 

After a minute, he comes back to life. His head jerks, punctuating angry, unintelligible sentences, and his gestures are so fast and hard, he could be either a martial artist or a symphony conductor. Clutched in one hand, a clear plastic bag holds a blue washrag and a box of medication.  Teens in the back curse louder, their swagger drowning out his delusions.

The driver can see some of this in the rear-view mirror—but he’s also monitoring the radio, watching the time, keeping an eye out for the souped-up cars that slice across his lane, responding to the string-pull stop requests that come every 100 yards or so, checking times on transfer tickets, helping gnarled hands feed the fare box with bills as creased and soft as their skin... 

He never knows which passenger could blow. Whose frustration might come flying at him with a punch to the face, coffee dumped on his groin, or the dull black barrel of a revolver slid from a pocket.

But he always knows it could happen.

Ray Friem, chief operating officer of Metro Transit (or, more formally, the Bi-StateDevelopment Agency) is a genial, heavyset, forthright guy. His words are plain, unspun. He projects concern.

But he has 900 bus operators to protect, and they’re driving through a region tense with outrage, frustration, and raw need.

St. Louis isn’t alone—the climate’s changing across the country, in ways a thermometer won’t register. There’s a Twitter account in Toronto named @StoptheAssaults, an international union report titled “Bus Drivers Under Attack.” In St. Louis, the numbers are blessedly low by comparison to cities like D.C. and Vancouver. 

Friem knows that a city is judged by its public transit—especially when smart young urban types are deciding where to live. He’s proud of Metro’s award-winning maintenance record, its clean-diesel engines (“I wouldn’t hesitate to have the exhaust system of one of our buses pumped into my house!”) and its role in making sure people aren’t trapped in jobless neighborhoods and can find their way to a workplace, a library, a college.

But many of his drivers don’t feel safe.

In the 2015 fiscal year (which ended June 30), drivers called in about 30 incidents, ranging from spitting to verbal threats to thrown objects and physical assaults. There are also incidents nobody bothers to call in, because it’s over and nothing can be done. Or the driver doesn’t want to anger a passenger she’ll see the next day and the day after that. Or the driver’s afraid he’ll lose his job because  he lost his cool and got up from his seat to defend himself.

In any event, some of the 30 were “fleeting situations” that the drivers never fully documented, Friem says, and of the 22 that were formally written up, only six were serious physical assaults—which, Metro public-safety chief Richard Zott notes, is  “statistically insignificant” when you consider the number of passenger interactions each driver experiences.

But in how many occupations would even six physical assaults a year be OK? 

“In the last three months we’ve had two fairly major ones,” Friem tells me in early August, “and the most disturbing thing is, we can look at the video, and nothing provoked them. It just happened.”

Surveillance video from May 5 showed a man stepping onto a bus and almost immediately punching the driver, smashing his cheekbone and blood vessels in his eyeball and slicing open his lip. The driver lost control of the bus—an employee shuttle the man shouldn’t have been riding in the first place—and it crashed into a shelter at Manchester and Hanley in Maplewood.

“The operator did absolutely nothing wrong,” Friem says. “This person got on board and just started going.”

The other assault, which involved an intoxicated passenger on the Grand bus, started with a thrown object and devolved from there. That one didn’t make the news—most assaults don’t, “unless a victim goes to the media,” notes attorney Randall Parker, “and they don’t go to the media, because they don’t want to lose their jobs.” 

Parker says a driver consults him about some kind of assault at least once a month. Metro doesn’t comment about “specific incidents, previous or current, because they may involve disciplinary cases or pending litigation,” notes communications director Patti Beck. So I ask Alicia Richardson, a bus operator who’s also a union representative for Amalgamated Transit Union Local 788, whether she’s heard of any incidents in the past six months.

“Let’s see. A young man assaulted about a month ago—a young lady threw hot coffee on him on the 70 Grand,” she says. “Prior to that, a 57-year-old woman fighting an 18-year-old girl who just didn’t want to pay her fare—that was on the 97 Delmar line. An intoxicated young lady on Grand shot the driver with a water gun. A young lady was threatened over by the Jamestown Mall in March; a young man threatened to kill her. He had a gun. He just didn’t want to pay his fare. And on the 47 Hanley, a young man was punched in the face by a passenger getting off the bus. Fare dispute again. The littlest things can tick them off.”

In April, a young man boarded the No. 2 Red at Pershing and Union and exposed himself. “She picks this gentleman up—it’s just him and her on the bus—and he proceeds to tell her everything he wants to do to her,” Mike Breihan, president of ATU Local 788, says grimly. “He asks if she has kids and says to take him to her house so he can do the same things to her daughter.” The driver pressed the button that lights an “Emergency Call Police” sign on the outside of the bus, and an off-duty Metro employee pulled up alongside and mouthed, “Are you OK?” She shook her head, terrified. When the bus reached Clayton, police were waiting.

“Sodas thrown on us, cups of coffee—they just heave it on you as they go out the door,” Breihan says, continuing the litany. “A driver was loading a wheelchair the other day, and another passenger got mad because it was taking too long and came up and hit the driver. Broke his glasses. Last week, a driver called in an argument between two passengers, and police searched the guy when he got off and found a gun.

“It varies from being spat on—which some people don’t think is an assault, but walk up to a police officer and spit on him and see what happens to you—to being hit with a chunk of cinderblock,” Breihan says. “Some kind of gang initiation bullshit. He goes to the bottom step, turns, and throws this piece of cinderblock at her face. Breaks her nose, breaks the eye socket. Just destroyed her face. That was about five years ago, over on Virginia in South St. Louis.”

Five years is the time frame Metro drivers keep giving me: “Even five to seven years ago it was a little better.” “Six years ago it was different.” “Past five years, it’s gotten worse and worse.” Unfortunately, it’s not possible to compare the stats from five years back: “We got a new system two years ago and brought two years of data with us,” Friem explains. But it’s only since the Ferguson unrest that he’s noticed a worsening; before that, the trend was downward, with 21 incidents in the 2012 fiscal year and only 13 each in 2013 and 2014. Metro hired Zott, a former federal agent, as public safety chief in 2012,  and it looked like his no-nonsense approach was paying off.

If you use the conservative 30 assaults a year, that means an assault of some sort—from physical force to a verbal threat serious enough to call in an alert—for 1 in every 30 drivers. But Zott points out that MetroBus had more than 29 million boardings last year, making the number of assaults statistically negligible. Most days, the drivers were perfectly safe. Just like the rest of us. 

But every day, the drivers are increasingly nervous. 

Just like the rest of us.

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I’m warned hard about the transfer stations. “You will see people hangin’ around beggin’, a lot of panhandlers, people who stole transfers, fights,” says a former driver. “People who don’t ride the bus, they have no clue.”

I ride up to Riverview, the bus gusting past Phaat Tires, Scrubby Inc., the Playboy El Cappuccino Lounge, and Baden’s Wilkommen sign. Our driver’s cheerful, chatting with passengers and waving at a little girl. Even when we wheeze around Halls Ferry Circle and a car skids out in front of us, she stays calm.

A nervous mom clutching a toddler by one hand wants directions and keeps asking, “Am I getting close, bus driver?” A young woman steps on, wearing tight, cuffed white jeans and a red sleeveless shirt that reads, “Sleep Is for the Rich.”

Riverview’s the only station with a public bathroom, run by a retail vendor Metro contracts with, and its sink is grotty from use, as though somebody poured out black paint and scrubbed it into the cracked porcelain. The bus schedules are all gone, replaced by Dollar General coupon fliers. A guy behind Plexiglas sells bus passes, cigarettes, ball caps, chips, and tiara necklaces through a transaction window.

It’s mid-morning, because I am a coward. Drivers warned me of drug deals up here, prostitution, and worse: “One time a bus driver dodged bullets up at Riverview and crawled under a bench.” But lately things are better, with police and Metro security officers moving loiterers along, and the passengers waiting on benches all seem peaceable.

Drivers hope that things will also improve at the Hanley station, famous for drugs, fights, and general chaos, and the Delmar station, where people high on booze or drugs “hang out all day on the Hodiamont track or the Burger King at Delmar and Kingshighway.”

“You can shoo them, to a point,” Friem says with a sigh, “but the bus stop itself is on a city sidewalk. We don’t own the sidewalks. Our authority out there on the streets is a lot different than our authority on a MetroLink platform.”  

Security is visible on those train platforms. Do Metro public safety officers stand guard at, say, Riverview? “We have at different points put somebody there eight or 12 hours a day,” Friem says. “Realistically, we have a patrol that spends a lot of time there but has other duties as well.”

Assaults are nothing new. People who ride the bus often face the frustrations of poverty or untreated mental illness, or they’re kids without cars, looking for a shot of power. But even Friem agrees that, societally, it’s getting worse: “In this last year, there’s a lot of unhappiness, and it’s being vocalized in a different way than it ever has.”

 “People feel disrespected,” Zott adds. “We hear that a lot.” 

Drivers are meeting a generation of riders who feel little incentive to pay authorities a respect that they doubt will ever be reciprocated. Forget quiet desperation—they’re living out loud, aggressively, with plenty of collateral damage.

“These are the ’80s babies. Their moms and dads were out there on drugs, and they are just out of control,” says Tiffany Carter, who quit driving this summer. “It’s the wild, wild West. I was on West Florissant at [Interstate] 70, parked at a light, and I heard pop-pop-pop. Thought, ‘We’ve got firecrackers out there.’ A guy in the outer lane going the wrong way pulled up and just started shooting at the car in front of me.” 

Chaos outside the bus, chaos inside. “One day they threw a full bottle of Mountain Dew at my head and laughed and ran,” says one of several operators who asked not to be named for fear of losing their jobs. “They get on and laugh at you and call you obscene names and sit right behind you and make it a joke.” Or they’re frustrated—one passenger took a swing at her because the bus was late. “I ducked, and he hit me in my shoulder. That kind of stuff goes on all the time—we just expect it. 

“Everybody’s not working right now,” she says, “and they know bus drivers make enough to live. And some people hate the fact that they are on drugs, and they hate you because you are in a good mood. They will get on the bus and blast you just to get it started, same way they are doin’ the police. They are doing it on purpose because they are miserable.”

For the many riders who do have jobs, a missed bus can mean catastrophe.

“The company has cut down on the number of buses on the street and lengthened the time between buses,” Breihan says, “so people have to wait longer, and they are depending on us to get to their jobs. It’s a sort of road rage—they’ve got to take it out on somebody. They just got to work late and the boss told them, ‘That’s it. That was the last time. You’re fired.’ And the poor sucker who’s driving the bus gets pulverized.”

Federal support for public transit operations ended in 1999. Metro carried on until 2009, when it was forced to reduce service because of a budget shortfall, the costs of the new MetroLink extension, and slow-growing revenue streams. Beck says service “has returned to pre-cut levels in most markets,” and many of the scheduling changes were made to accommodate peak periods. 

With more operating funds, more could be done. But public transit budgets are tight across the country. As a result, says Larry Hanley, the ATU’s international president, “at a time when, with a straight face, people are saying, ‘We have to cut taxes for billionaires,’ we went out and raised taxes for every person in America who rides a bus.”

Metro was judicious: A regular bus ticket is still $2, and the price of a train ticket rose only from $2.25 to $2.50. But the agency’s long-range transit plan calls for additional fare increases every two years, and that doesn’t bode well, given that most assaults happen after someone’s told to pay more or get off the bus.

In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a fare dispute prompted a passenger to growl at the driver, threaten to bite off her nose, and then punch her in the face. In Albuquerque, a man whose pass had expired punched and knocked out a bus driver. A Boston man refused to pay the full fare and punched the driver in the face. A Kansas City driver was stabbed multiple times and assaulted by riders who’d cussed him out and refused to pay their fares. An Oregon driver was hit in the head repeatedly after telling a passenger that he hadn’t paid the correct fare.

Granted, fare disputes don’t explain the San Francisco driver who was stabbed in the leg, the Boston driver who was choked, the Cleveland driver hit with a sock filled with rocks, or the drunken crowd in Australia who threatened a bus driver with a machete. Sometimes the aggression is random, displaced, or psychotic. 

But most often, it follows a fare dispute—a fact that is hard for people who drive in quiet, comfortable cars to even fathom.

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Again and again, bus operators describe themselves as sitting ducks. 

“If they don’t have enough money for the fare, they say, ‘Eff you.’ Guys get spit on all the time. They jumped a bus driver two weeks ago,” says a former driver whose nerves are shot, for reasons both personal and professional. His bus was caught in crossfire years ago, a bullet whizzing past his head “piercing loud. Boom. I ducked and drove till I got clear, then made a left and stopped the bus. I’d cut the lights off after the shots, and people hit the floor.”

More recently, “three men got on the Florissant bus with guns and robbed the driver,” he continues. “A young lady, a rider broke her nose at Michigan and Grand. Dude got on the bus and hit her.” He sips his beer—we’re talking in a dark, pin drop–quiet corner of Cicero’s—and shakes his head slowly. “My grandmother used to tell me, ‘Everything you do has a consequence. You can’t cuss me out today and then tomorrow, everything is all right.’ But with bus drivers, there are no consequences.” 

Breihan talks about how helpless a driver is: “People will ring the bell and, as you open the door, they punch you and jump out. You’re dazed, you can’t close the door in time, and, if you do close it and trap them and get out of your seat and beat the crap out of them, the company looks at you like you are the aggressor. So all you can do is let them hit you.” 

He’s a big guy, the beloved high school football coach type, and you can tell it’s killing him even to admit this. 

“We actually took training on what to do if somebody comes up and tries to assault you.” He starts laughing. “What you are supposed to do is turn around”—he mimes a pivot to the side in his chair—“lean back, put your feet in the air, kick at them and say, ‘No, no, don’t, don’t, stop!’ Now, how foolish is that? By the time you got your seat belt off…”

Friem’s never had the training, so he’s not exactly sure to what Breihan’s referring, but he says that seat belts are an old labor–management wrangle. As for operators’ feeling trapped and unable to defend themselves, he can’t imagine any training manual advocating that they get up and punch a passenger who’s threatening them. 

That sense of exposure and vulnerability wears on the drivers, though. “Driving a Metro bus is like serving in Iraq—you never know when you will hit a land mine or come under fire from an unseen enemy,” remarks Dean Rosen, a St. Louis psychologist who has treated many drivers who’ve sustained assaults. You have to be vigilant to do the job, but after trauma, he says, that vigilance spills over to the rest of your life, “which is wearing and exhausting.” 

When Carter quit this summer, years of stress melted away. She’d been tough, letting insults and cussing roll off her back. But “in January of this year, I was driving the 97 Delmar, and a guy grabbed my breast,” she says. He was unwashed, so rank she could smell him. A former police officer, she insisted on making a report but says that “the police weren’t too excited about it, and the transit service manager kept smiling like it was a joke.

“A woman that drove the 61 Chambers had her wig pulled off,” she continues. “One friend, somebody came up and pointed a gun at her while she was driving, and then he left. She never did anything about it.”

Parker says he has a client who was driving when a passenger standing behind her—out of her field of vision, possibly armed—said, “I’m going to kill you.” The driver stood and broke the rules by punching the rider—Parker says, she feared for her life. The passenger later pleaded guilty to assault, “and Metro is still denying the driver’s claim because she left her chair.”

Drivers “have this fear not only of being assaulted but that their job is going to be in jeopardy,” he says, “and because Metro does not go after these people, they are out there, and the driver’s always fearful it’s going to happen again. Most of it’s psychological. They can’t sleep—and you can’t have a bus driver who’s not rested! It affects their marriages, their relationships, everything.”

A current driver gives management props: “Metro goes out of its way to have safety classes, and they give you a line to call and talk to somebody anytime you want. Still, I think they need to protect us a little more.”

But how?

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Friem says that the strongest remedies are driver training—to defuse situations before they get out of hand—and camera surveillance. There are now high-definition cameras with audio on every bus: “If an incident was within view of one of them, it will be recorded. Physical assault, just about every time there’s going to be good video evidence. The operator has the ability to hit a button, ‘Record This Event,’ a minute before or two minutes after, and there can be up to 10 events before they overwrite. Once the operator calls and says, ‘I saved the video,’ Rich’s guys go download it.” 

Zott says they do “literally thousands of DVD pulls”—on average, 350 a month. “Not all incidents,” he adds hastily. “They’re all different reasons: ‘A driver passed me up’; ‘a bus chipped my mirror.’ But nine times out of 10, anything that happens on the bus, we will have the video.”

Parker raises an eyebrow when he hears that. In his experience, the cameras, “many times, are not operational. Can’t say one way or another why not, but it’s funny how often it happens.” In one of his worker comp cases, he says, a driver was hurt when “the gal hit him in the head with a bottle of nail polish, threw it hard, and they think that is a very frivolous claim. That one didn’t show up—no video.” He reads aloud a letter he just received from one of Metro’s lawyers about another case: “As I understand it, there is no onboard video…” 

In any event, surveillance helps more with detection than with prevention. That’s why the ATU is working with the Federal Transit Administration on physical measures, pushing for a design of new buses that will give drivers an “out”—an exit door to their left—and a protective barrier. 

Friem tells me the cost of the barrier alone would be about $4,000 or $5,000 per bus. “And an operator’s space isn’t very big to begin with, and it gets claustrophobic pretty fast. The problem is, once you have them, you can’t get rid of them.”

What about the retractable shields that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is using, which cost about $1,500?

“I’m not familiar with those,” he says, promising to look into it.

Like St. Louis, D.C. saw “a significant uptick in bus operator assaults last year, ranging from spitting to stabbing operators on duty,” spokesman Richard Jordan tells me. “There were 80 assaults compared to 57 the previous year.” Their response includes shields (which will be on one-third of the fleet by the end of 2016) and more Metro Transit Police riding the buses. 

Systems across the country are finding ways to take fare collection off the bus and put it on the street, so by the time someone boards he or she has a ticket and there’s no room to argue with the driver. Bus passes help, but now Friem’s working on smart cards, which can be loaded at a vending machine at the station so the bus operator doesn’t have to worry about selling transfers. Passengers will still be able to pay a one-ride fare with cash on the bus, though. “The people who need the transit most are the least likely to have a pass,” he says. “A lot of people are unbanked, and they are going to have a heck of a time if I create that barrier for them. So yeah, we are pursuing the smart card—but I’ve gotta be able to get you to work the day before payday.”

Also in the works: stiffer penalties. Missouri legislators have passed a bill making a serious assault of a transit worker a class B felony. The new law will go into effect in January 2017; Friem has no idea why it’s taking so long. But Hanley, the ATU president, isn’t convinced that it’ll be a deterrent anyway: “The truth of the matter is, most assaults on drivers are crimes of passion, not calculation.” 

When violence erupts, the MetroBus training materials say, the operator should “call the Bus Operations Control Dispatcher, reporting your run number, line, bus number, exact location, direction of travel and repeat the appropriate radio code.”

“Last night a driver called for safety at a station,” a driver tells me, “and the controller said, ‘You need safety for what reason, ma’am?’” If somebody’s standing behind you with a gun threatening to kill you, she adds, you can’t exactly go into detail. 

Nor do drivers like the idea of pulling over. “The dispatcher will say, ‘OK, well, pull the bus over, park it, and wait for the police,’” Breihan says. “As soon as you hit that brake, the guy knows exactly what you’re doing, and he’ll come up and get in two or three swings and get off the bus—break the glass in the back and get out that door if he has to. I’ve already had them climbing out windows.”

Metro’s new communications technology should help, Friem says, because an operator can now keep driving after discreetly triggering an alarm, and law enforcement can track the bus’s progress and intercept. The downside of that is, “St. Louis is blessed with any number of municipalities, and which police department do you call, if the bus is moving? It leads to some very interesting conversations—which is why we would like to be able to handle more of that ourselves.”

In most large cities, public transit has a police force of its own. Here, Metro only has public safety officers, and their powers are limited. 

On the bright side, Friem says, “police response time has improved significantly since we have the AVL [automatic vehicle locator] online.” Response times have long been an issue—all those little police departments are already stretched thin, and bus calls aren’t always a high priority. The driver whose nose was broken in South City? “Her husband was coming all the way from North County,” another driver says, “and he got there before the police did.”

When I say that I’ve spoken with bus drivers, communications director Patti Beck frowns: “They are supposed to clear that with us.” I suggest that Metro select some of its most experienced drivers for me to interview. A few weeks later, I go to Metro’s Delmar office, where three drivers—and Beck—are waiting in a big conference room. 

Bruce Williams goes first, speaking in a deep, gravelly voice that a character actor would kill for. “There’s a lot more violence, a lot more disrespect,” he says, “and you have to be politically correct, because you’ve got five cameras over your head. That limits you on being able to possibly control the situation.” He says he can usually handle violent situations: “In 42 years, I’ve actually called the police and shut the unit down three times.” Later, he adds that he’s pretended to call the police, picking up the phone without hitting the button, about three hundred times.

“Does it work?” Beck asks.

“Not anymore.”

For a driver who’s “young, weighs about 115 pounds, and looks 15, you probably need a cage around the unit,” Williams says. “I think it’s a good start.” What he really wants, though, is “some response from Metro security to our serious situations on the bus. Can they personally respond and make that presence felt, as opposed to waiting on the local police, shutting the unit down in the middle of Kinloch in a serious assault situation? It seems like Metro could show up, if not before, then after, somewhere along the way.”

Williams says his wife drives, too, but after being assaulted “by a young lady who was upset the bus was late,” she switched to the train. “She always wants to go back—there’s more money on the bus side—and I say, ‘You don’t need to be on the bus. You’ve been gone six years. Six years ago is night and day, it’s changed that much.” 

He’s afraid for her safety, but he’s also afraid that she’ll get fired, because she doesn’t let stuff roll off her back the way he does: “They tell you, if you are assaulted, ‘Stop. Quit. Don’t.’ And somebody’s punching the crap out of you. Really?” He looks Beck in the eye. “It’s the attitude we drivers perceive,” he explains. “That’s what’s frustrating.”

Orvin Wooten, who’s been driving for 38 years, speaks next; his demeanor is milder but just as compelling. After dealing with as many as 1,000 people a day, these men have acquired a gravitas that would be hard to challenge. 

“The attitude of the public has changed dramatically to be more aggressive,” Wooten observes. “They call it their ‘right to speak.’ ‘You can’t tell me to shut up.’ ‘You can’t tell me what I can and cannot say.’ The conversations we hear used to be restricted to the back of the bus. Over the years, that conversation has crept forward.”

The insistence on speech, however vulgar or offensive, has a lot to do with aggression, he believes. “It’s ‘I want to be seen.’ ‘I want to be known.’ ‘I want to be important.’ Talking loud makes them noticed. Acting out makes them noticed. And because there’s no penalization for acting out, these young folks know what they can get away with.” He, too, gets little nonsense: “Everybody’s rode with me since they were young kids, but that is earned. These young folks haven’t earned that, and, trust me, they know who’s new—and they will try them.”

Pamela Fayne, who drives the 94 Page, uses a bubbly stream of wit and common sense to outsmart antagonistic passengers. “I do this all the time,” she says, twirling one finger above her head. “I say, ‘You see the cameras, right?’” Still, the previous week a young man was rolling joints in front of her as she was training a new driver. “When I asked him not to, he said he was not getting ready to let it go to waste.”

Wooten rests his forearms on the table and leans forward. “We senior drivers, we want the young drivers to stay—but changes need to be made in order to provide an atmosphere for them to want to stay. What we are hearin’ now is ‘I can’t do this.’”

“That’s why I think we need to go back to undercover policemen,” Fayne says. “You need to protect your passengers as well as your drivers—because even with a cage, no conscientious driver is going to let someone on our bus be abused.”

Her words spark Williams to interject: “I have stopped assaults by getting up out of my seat and getting in between the two or three who were going at it and saying, ‘Not on my bus’—situations that were serious to the point where knives were drawn.” Today, he says, he’d be on camera and he’d lose his job. So he feels helpless, unable to be “the captain of the ship,” responsible for every passenger. 

All three agree that what’s needed, far more than physical barriers or cages, are more undercover security officers riding the buses now and then. “And this guy that’s actin’ the fool? Detain him,” Williams says. “You used to hear ‘Operator, would you stop the bus?’ and you look back and somebody’s standing up putting handcuffs on somebody.”

Fayne nods: “Chambers, Florissant—they could ride all day and get action all day.”

“We have various campaigns,” Beck interjects, “and we are launching another one that asks our customers to be respectful of each other. ‘Don’t be that guy.’”

The drivers trade looks, and Williams tells her gently, “At the end of the day, respect is earned, not given. You can put up all the posters you want. Until there are consequences, nothing is going to happen.”

“And remember,” Fayne adds, “these people don’t respect authority, so those posters aren’t going to mean anything.” 

“He wasn’t usin’ one of those posters to roll his joint, was he?” Williams adds dryly.

Everybody laughs, except Beck.

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When I meet with Zott and Friem again, Friem’s checked into the retractable shields. He says “they look a lot like vinyl shower curtains”—but just might work, because the problems here are more likely to be punches than gunshots or stabbings. 

Our first interview took place shortly after the Maplewood assault, and he was vehement: “We gotta get this guy. Our cameras are pretty good, and we are pretty damn good at making arrests. We have a high, high percentage of arrests. I want people to know, ‘Look, you do this to any of our employees—any of our customers—and we will ID you. We will catch you. We will prosecute.’” 

When I repeated that vow to Parker, he objected as if he were in court: “I will dispute that. They do not do that. It’s up to the individual driver to take time off and go to court. Metro does not want publicity on people getting attacked on buses.”

But now Friem is telling me that they succeeded: They pulled the guy’s photo from the surveillance video and passed it around, found out what bus he regularly rode. He was arrested and charged. 

Great, I say. How many other arrests and prosecutions over the past five years? 

They don’t have that information.

“Once we turn the surveillance video over,” Zott explains, “we lose track of it.”

(In Toronto, a court advocate helps operators who’ve been assaulted navigate the court system, then lobbies the Crown for heavier sentences.)

I ask about bringing back the undercover officers who used to ride the buses and arrest offenders on the spot. 

“We’re already doing it,” Zott says. “We have an ongoing undercover program.” Metro contracts with off-duty police officers to help the public safety department monitor buses. “And we have a specific bus team,” Zott says, “and that’s all they do are the buses.” 

Wow. The drivers don’t even realize that. How many officers on the bus team?

“Four.”

They board when there are specific complaints or issues, make random inspections, and respond to calls for service. “A security guy can walk through the buses and show the flag, just to show the riding public—and the driver—there is security around this system,” Friem says. 

But then the officer gets off the bus, and it starts moving. 

“Of all my bus cases over the past 35 years,” Parker says, “I have had a few hundred assaults, and there has never once been a security person on the bus.” 

Friem says “the new smart card will increase our presence on the buses.” Even though the system’s far from ready, Metro is “prehiring security for fare enforcement.” Their eventual role will be to ride the system, answer questions, make sure passengers are swiping their smart cards, and resolve any disputes, so those arguments don’t escalate.

For now, drivers feel pretty helpless, I say. They don’t feel that Metro is doing enough to make them safe, and they feel trapped by the seatbelt. Is it ever OK for them to get up to, say, break up a fight?

“We encourage them, if there’s a fight, to call dispatch,” Zott says. “Nine times out of 10, by the time we get there or the police get there, the individuals have left the bus.” 

Not much incentive to call, then. 

“If the physical assaults continue,” Friem sighs, “I’m going to almost have to do the physical barrier.” But his first hope is to arm his operators with words, do “more aggressive de-escalation training,” maybe add some role-playing, so they know how to defuse virtually any situation. 

“They are the pointy end of the sword,” he says. “They’re what everything we do is about. They have to want to come to work, and you can’t do that if you are fearful.”

Drivers are never expected to risk their lives collecting a fare. “Metro does tell you, ‘Do not confront people. Do not argue,’” a driver says, “but it’s stressful. I asked this one guy, ‘Can you settle down? We have kids on this bus.’ I had to repeat it and say, ‘I am going to have to pull this bus over.’ And he said, ‘Pull the bus over and get shot in your face.’” Her voice goes flat. “There is nothing stopping somebody from killing you on that bus.”