Later in the day, the westbound K, headed for downtown Miami, pulls up to the curb at Eighth Street and Washington Avenue in Miami Beach. The K's driver is Herardo San Juan, a lanky Cuban who has been operating public buses for seventeen years. In three years he can retire with his full pension. "People sometimes bring their personal problems on the bus," San Juan says. "So you learn to give people the benefit of the doubt. But I've learned to keep my mouth shut because arguing with the customers is not going to make a difference."
Jonathan Postal
Jonathan Postal
Jeff Bradley (top left) says bus drivers need lessons in customer service. According to MDTA, more than half of the bus riding population is black or Hispanic
Related Content
More About
At 8:41 on another July morning, two buses approach the intersection of West 68th Street and West 28th Avenue in Hialeah, near one of the designated bus stops for the Hialeah Gardens Connection.
With his right thumb, the driver of the first bus points me to the bus behind his. The electronic sign on the second bus isn't working, so a large 282 is stenciled in black marker onto a piece of paper pasted to the windshield.
I wave to the bus in an attempt to stop it. The driver sees me, yet keeps going. "Hey!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I yelp. As if my voice-cracking beagle squeal was going to stop her.
By luck, she comes to a halt about a quarter of the block down from the designated bus stop to let off a passenger. I run. Get on. Out of breath and pissed off, I ask her: "Why didn't you stop?!"
"That's not the designated bus stop," she retorts.
A bit later, Ms. Congeniality arrives at the Wal-Mart off the Okeechobee Road exit of the Palmetto Expressway. In a great feat of wisdom by the Miami-Dade Transit Agency, both the southbound and northbound 282 share this same stop. A crowd gazes at the bus, perplexed by the paper sign. Maybe some people are headed south to the Metrorail station, maybe not. Who knows?
We'll never know because the bus driver didn't stop to inform the people waiting at Wal-Mart which direction she was headed. "I'm only supposed to stop if they signal me to stop," she snorts. "Y'all people who ride the bus don't understand that we have to follow rules and regulations. Y'all just want us to do what y'all want us to do. When you become a bus driver, you can do whatever you want."
____________________________________
Since 2002, Miami-Dade Transit has fired three bus drivers as a result of customer complaints. Another 21 bus drivers have been suspended from work, while 32 operators have received written reprimands.
Miami-Dade County employs 1479 full-time and part-time bus drivers. Of those, 1332 are black, 491 are Hispanic, and the remainder are white, Asian, or Indian. Almost half of the black drivers (633) are women between the ages of 21 and 60. Since the People's Transportation Plan was approved, the transit agency has hired 639 new bus drivers, who earn a starting salary of $13.14 an hour. The average Miami-Dade bus operator earns $17.50 an hour.
Miami-Dade Transit has 834 buses in its fleet. The county has purchased 170 buses in the two years since voters approved the PTP. Most of the new buses were put on routes serving Miami International Airport and tourist destination Miami Beach. For example, the J Metrobus route has the luxury of new buses equipped with passenger reading lights and overhead compartments for people to store their belongings. The transit agency plans to buy up to 341 more minibuses and replace 700 regular buses by 2008.
The agency operates buses that are eighteen years old and have logged more than a million service miles. Transit director Roosevelt Bradley predicts the county will have a state-of-the-art fleet consisting of more than 1200 buses by 2008.
As of today, Miami-Dade Transit operates 99 bus routes including ten new ones: the 99, the Coconut Grove Circulator, the Little Havana Circulator, the Sweetwater Circulator, the Flagami Connection, the Coral Gables Connection, the Hialeah Gardens Connection, the Little Haiti Connection, the Coral Way Max, and the Midnight Owl.
According to a draft analysis of Miami-Dade Transit users, 60 percent of bus riders are female; 86 percent are black or Hispanic, and the remainder are categorized as nonwhite Hispanic or other. About 77 percent of all transit users have an annual household income of $40,000 or less, and 40 percent are either unemployed or retired.
