Or “You Want Me To Drive This Bus Where?”

When I rebooted this blog, I promised some school bus tales, so here goes.

Training to drive the bus wasn’t too difficult, despite the obvious differences between it and a car. Off-road training and on-road training, as well as many hours in the classroom, had me set up to pass the Ontario B Class licence tests without too many issues. Of course, all that training really didn’t prepare me for the bulk of the challenges to come. There were students to consider, schools, and the thousands of little roads in and around the school district, most of which I’d never heard of.

On my first day driving a bus route, I did have the benefit of an experienced driver come with me. It was a dark and very cold January morning that I headed out to Townline Road, a gravel track out towards Lake St. Clair. I had my map (not easy to read in the dark), but I had never been this far west of the City, and had hardly driven a bus in the dark at all, so it was all very challenging. Add to the mix that my fingers were frozen (buy some decent gloves, I thought) and the fact that I was pretty nervous, and it all added up to a tough start. I do still remember picking up my first student, though, and she was still smiling when we got to school so I must have been doing something right.

The next day I was on my own, and my route timings were terrible. Being new, I did everything slowly, and ended being late to school for the first run, then late for the second run’s start, and even later to that school. In the afternoon, the drivers waiting at my second run school were radioing to find out where I was, so late was I. It wasn’t that I got lost or anything, but until you get into the routine of it, and get to know your route, it all seems to take way too long.

With the added distraction of the students, mostly well behaved I will admit, I let some of that training I worked so hard at, go by the board, and worked on speeding up some of the processes, like loading and unloading. It was a case of concentrate on a few things then, when you’ve mastered them, work on a few of the other things. It took me a while to remember to check that tail swing on the corners, because I was so busy with the other stuff.

But it started to come together. I bought some better gloves, a light for my maps, and even some variable-focus lens glasses as reading the maps wearing my fixed focus glasses was difficult. I also started to find out about the locale. I had no idea just how far the school district extended, and for the longest time I was driving out on country roads that I really hadn’t known existed. Things were not helped by the fact that I couldn’t learn a specific route because as a new boy, I was put onto covering other people’s runs, so I had new maps and new places to drive all the time. Fortunately, map reading, and finding my way around, comes easily to me, so it wasn’t too long before a run out to Duart, or to Florence (relatively remote farming communities, both), were becoming a lot easier. Indeed, the Dispatcher had me doing different routes almost daily as I was both effective at covering them, and I was keen to learn and to take them on.

The first few weeks were also complicated by the Canadian winter, with ice and snow to deal with, and such cold that I hadn’t experienced before. The buses were heated, of course, but the for the first twenty-five minutes or so, it was like driving a freezer. More than once I had to stop the bus to hack ice off the windows, the mirrors and even the Stop sign. That said, as my abilities and knowledge improved, so did the weather, and by June and the summer vacation, I had the school district down, my route timings were where they should be and I had never been lost, nor had even the slightest of collisions, which wasn’t too shabby for a newcomer. Dealing with the students was another issue, though, and I tended to leave them to their own devices, especially as I had different routes most days. The little ones were noisy, the middle schoolers at the French language schools were difficult (not because they spoke French, they didn’t while they were on the bus, but it was more to do with a perceived entitlement, I think), and it took me a lot longer to get to grips with having to cope with kids running around the bus, and to drive the darned thing at the same time. I quickly came to appreciate the high school students as generally, if left alone, they just kept themselves to themselves.

I had a couple of wobbles when driving, at least early on. Getting called in to work very early (a consequence of my being overly helpful, I think) on a dark and snowy morning and having to drive out to Ridgetown in an old and rickety bus, had me questioning why I was doing this, because the pay was definitely not stellar given the effort required. A couple of times when students were being very difficult also had me thinking that it wasn’t worth the hassle, at least given the poor compensation. Then on other days, particularly when the mornings were lighter and the weather was warmer, it did seem like a pretty good job. Like the time I had some high schoolers from Wallaceburg laughing like drains and leading me on a circuitous round around Sombra, trading on my unfamiliarity with the place, having me drop them at their homes rather than their actual stops, all because I was struggling with the map. You lose some, you win some.

Even in those early days, though, I was getting the warning signs that the company I was working for were operating on a shoe string. Not that the buses were dangerous, or too many operational corners were being cut, but there was definite lack of investment, in equipment and drivers, that didn’t bode well for the future.

That’s for another day, though.