I’ve had a number of conversations recently where people were complaing about the bus drivers. Ken has a grumpy speed demon on the bus he takes to work, and one of my co-workers is unhappy with the way one driver stops when picking up passengers on Churchill (instead of pulling over and allowing traffic to pass the bus stops in the lane, blocking everyone) and I had a completely unacceptable interaction with a Para Transpo driver a few days ago.

Surely they aren’t all like this, right?

Now, to be fair, it’s probably only a minority of drivers who are behaving like this, but this minority is giving OC Transpo as a whole a bad rep. Most of the bus drivers I’ve encountered have been polite and helpful, but there have been a couple over the years that fall into the category of “Memorable”, sub-category “(but not in a good way)”.

Speaking of customer relations, I had a call this afternoon from the person at Para Transpo who is handling my complaint. They wanted to confirm the location because they couldn’t see the vehicle stopping on Bank Street in their tracking system, but that’s probably because it wasn’t actually stopped for very long before the driver pulled onto a side street after we had our “conversation”. Apparently, they track all their vehicles for a variety of reasons, including dealing with complaints. One thing she mentioned is that even though an area may be signed “no stopping, buses only” they’re only supposed to be used by buses when picking up or dropping off passengers. They’re not intended to be used by drivers who want to hop out on some personal errand, like the Para Transpo driver I encountered.

This will be the last time I hear from Para Transpo concerning this incident because they do not provide feedback on the disciplinary action. They’re going to pull the driver in and discuss the incident with them and take action. As they use a progressive discipline system, the result could vary from “smarten up and don’t do this again” to “your services are no longer required”, depending on what else is in the employee’s file. Perfectly reasonable.

Oh, but most importantly they apologized.