With Muni still at only 63 percent of pre-pandemic ridership, it would seem that fewer passengers would make a driver’s job easier.
Instead, drivers said, too many passengers getting onto their buses and trains are violent, erratic and troublesome — for them and other passengers.
It is, they said, the toughest time they’ve had to work in decades.
“After the pandemic, people have gotten more and more hostile,” said Carlos, a nine-year Muni operator, who now drives the 9R San Bruno Rapid and the 14R Mission Rapid.
Riders taunt him, he shouts at them to sit down. They sit, but then get into more trouble. “There are cameras on the bus, but people don’t care,” he said. They will masturbate, they will sink into unconsciousness. His instructions from superiors: Stay in your seat and drive.
Carlos’ experiences are not uncommon among the 187 Muni operators affiliated with the Flynn Division, the third-largest among Muni’s nine maintenance and operations facilities, located at 15th and Harrison streets. Most operators asked not to share their names as they are afraid of upsetting their passengers and Muni.
Nonetheless, they were all eager to vent. A veteran operator who’s now on the 9R says he has learned to smile as riders try to get a free ride, jump out between stops to hail the bus, or even threaten to hijack the bus. “Give me the bus. Get off the seat. Let me drive,” he recalls one passenger telling him. He did not.
He knows how to distinguish the screamers from those who may hit him at the head. “Have a seat. Here’s a transfer,” is what he says most often.
“Some people are just so negative, and they want to bring people down with them,” he said. “It’s your misery, you’re trying to bring me down. It’s just not going to work.”
At the lounge on 15th Street where the drivers eat and relax, multiple safety flyers warn of troublemakers and incidents. On May 4, for example, a suspect threw a large glass bottle of liquor at an operator’s forehead when the driver refused to make an unauthorized stop.
Everyday there’s one operator who gets assaulted, said Anthony Ballester, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 250A, which represents more than 2,000 Muni operators. “We really don’t have any protection and we are easy targets,” he explained.
Muni operators are unarmed.
Oftentimes, drivers said, it’s impossible to make every passenger happy — there is just too much happening at once. A female Muni operator explained the many conflicting tasks she must attend to: You’ve got to protect yourself. You’ve got to watch out for motorists, pedestrians, scooters, bikers, walkers and all that. At the same time, she says, she’s taking incoming fire: They throw bottles at our window. They spit on us.
She is on stand-by from 1 p.m. to 1 a.m. “That’s when the zombies come out. People zombies. Walking zombies.” The self-described rookie says seeing people having sex in the back has become so common that it no longer jars her.
The names she is called are constant and varied: “I’ve been called Picaninny, fat ass, the black Chinese bitch,” she said.
Her armor? Prayer and a stern demeanor. “You can’t be yourself while you’re driving,” she said. “You have to turn into somebody else.”
At times, she threatens to call the police, but she also knows it will take 20 minutes or longer for SFPD or staff from Muni’s operations hub, the Transportation Management Center, to show up.
“Because TMC is understaffed right now,” said Ballester.
Another female operator who drives the 14R joined the chat as she prepared a Nissin cup of noodles for lunch. “The moment they see you a female, the first thing they call you is a bitch. They just treat you differently. Like they might say nothing to him, [but] say something to me because I’m a female,” she said, pointing to her male colleague.
“You gotta have that tone in your voice, ‘Who are you talking to?’” she said.
Just last week a man threatened to kill her if she didn’t let him off at a place where the bus doesn’t stop. When he finally got off, she said, she bade him goodbye with, “Have a nice day!”
There was another wheelchair rider who used to masturbate every time he boarded her bus. He would moan and show off in front of kids. “Out,” she shouted. “You so nasty. Get off.” She no longer lets him on her bus.
A driver who gave his name as Christopher agrees that it has never been worse on the 9R. The three doors open at the same time and prevent him from seeing everything, but he knows crowds of homeless people, which sometimes include an old man covered by feces, are boarding to use his bus as a “mobile hotel.”
He pleaded with this reporter to ride his bus so that he can get help. He asked the Transit Management Center for help, but they told him to keep the bus rolling unless somebody is injured.
“10 out of 10 Muni operators have high blood pressure. This job will cost you day after day,” said Christopher. “I have to. I got bills to pay. I have a family to support.”
Muni provides a peer system to help drivers with stress. A 25-year Muni veteran, who gave his name as Joe, said he’s not seeing the point: Every day he and his peers must go through the same hell onboard their buses, and every day it is ultimately a one-man struggle. “Are you also helping me tomorrow?” he asked.
“We are tools. This is who they wind up to make the bus go,” George, a five-year operator interrupted from an adjacent table. “They enforce the rules on us, they don’t enforce the rules on passengers.”
“The city is not going to stop anyone from getting on the bus,” said Ballester, the union president. “Every time someone gets on and off, they’re counted. So all the riders that go on a bus, that equals the fundings from the government.”
“Me, personally, I had to come to work no matter what, whether I want to or not, whether I feel good or not,” George added. But the increasing pressure leaves a mark. “But it’s like, I can’t believe my alarm’s already going off. And then I look at my checkbook and I go.”