Thank you Ms Bus Driver

I live for public transit. I am constantly learning my way among trains and subways to make traveling across the City and State and across State lines in which to expedite and in turn travel safely and cheaply. I don’t mind renting a car but with the price of fuel it is not worth the hassle to worry about it, parking and the rest. I grew up taking the 5 Phinney in Seattle and when you grow up using public transit you realize the convenience and affordability it offers. And then you read about the Subway stabbings, shootings and other problems that are a secondary plague affecting mass transit across the country. For the record, this is not new it is just expanded as the homeless, the deeply mentally ill have found themselves literally stranded in cities across the country in search of, well I have no clue what brought them to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Nashville, Seattle, New York and the city of Denver which this story is about. I do not believe they got there and in turn found themselves unable to be employed, find housing and/or went on a binge of drugs and alcohol to the point they have lost all functioning. This is a slide that starts out slow, out of a crisis and then over time (a time frame that can be weeks to days to months to years) they finally collapsed into the heap you see on your local corners, under freeway underpasses and anywhere they can lay their head.

Yesterday I read of another recall effort in San Francisco regarding their current City Attorney, the job VP Kamala Harris had during her time there which she frankly did not better than the current job she has. I am not a fan of Ms Harris, style over substance and with that I will move on. But the City has always been a haven for many. There is a strong Asian population, the Latin community of the Mission district, of course the Gay Community and many other Bohemian types drawn by the liberal politics and the stunning beauty this city of 49 square miles brings. And with it there are many good memories I have of the area, having lived in Berkeley and Oakland as well over the course of a decade. But like my home of Seattle, I am done with the West Coast and am fine with that decision. There is a passive aggressive nature to the persona of the Coastal Elites that make the passive aggressive behavior of Southerners seem almost quaint if not just a quirk of the region. And trust me the South invented it but Seattle perfected it. And yes it exists here but it is more in a sense of entitlement and arrogance that makes sense if you lived here. Like corruption it is just an accepted part of the way of life. I find it highly entertaining on most days. Think Chris Christie and Bill DiBlasio if they were Gay and Anna Delvey was their daughter and they came to your Pride Party and were the last to leave. You would reconsider having another party next year or at least the guest list.

San Francisco the last time I visited was four years ago and it was already descending into madness. The amount of Tech companies that have moved in and up were making The City (and btw that is how the pretentious in San Francisco refer to the city as “The City) unaffordable if not undesirable. The Pot Shops were aplenty and of course the cool food spots and hipster hangouts were everywhere now as opposed to just a few locales. The great funky hotels almost gone, other than my favorite The Phoneix in the Tenderloin which is where I always stay as it has a pool, great food and is the last of the era in a city that struggles to balance the past with the present. I would not stay there now it is simply not safe enough to walk alone if at all. With that now what was confined to spots and some blocks has permeated the City and made it all unsafe and utterly filthy. The City already recalled some of the School Board Members this last year and now the City Attorney is finding himself the target of ire of those sick of what is across every city today – crime. It is why NYC elected the moron Eric Adams as Mayor as he was a former Cop and promised he would not defund the Police and with that crime is still a major problem. Go figure. He is a moron. Utterly hilarious but still a walking moron. Okay a swaggering moron. They will not recall him as people don’t here, we either wait for a scandal that forces them to quit or wait to vote them out. Our Mayor here in Jersey City wisely keeps crime data under lock and key so the allusion of safety is here despite I am sure is not safe. Our Mayor is invisible if not inaccessible as frankly he is busy planning running for the Governor’s office and opening up a pot shop in Hoboken. Well, a good back up plan is always essential. He ran unopposed and the pandemic enabled that to do so with ease as most of our residents are largely Immigrants and likely unable to vote, have no real vested interest in local politics and with that it makes keeping the status quo just that. People fear, well everything, but change is on the list as well.

But as you read the story below about the Denver Bus Driver her story is not a new or unique story. It is, again, a major problem everywhere. But the sheer level of her coping strategies, her own determination to succeed is impressive. I feel the same way when I work in the schools. I am invisible, alone and spend hours just sitting there and if I don’t get abused I consider it a good day. Imagine going to work, no one knowing your name, addressing you with common courtesy and the endless parade of troubled individuals coming in and out of your workplace, be that a classroom or a bus, which you have to account for and handle. I will never forget that Bitch Admin at Ferris and the way she spoke to me those times that led me to call the suicide hotline, that was when I realized I had the power to never set foot in that school again. And as the year ends I have not. We will see in the fall. But the coping strategies of the Driver I get, I walk, I cry, I find healing through alternative means and I get up and do it again with the belief that this is another day. Not a bad one nor a good one, just another one. And we are the invisible work force and the same goes for the homeless, the unhoused, the troubled, the mentally ill and the many who are simply on the fringes. We all share that sense of not being seen and in turn acknowledged nor respected for any of that which we do, but what we are seen for is for what we FAIL to do.

And while we can recall our Politicians and demand them to do something, we really have no clue what is to be done. We are fine with the clutching of pearls and hands and we can navigate around it until it encroaches now to our doorstep, then suddenly it does become our problem. And then we again demand those we elected to fix “it” be “it” guns, homeless, drugs etc. What we don’t realize that the Pol has already made the call to move onto a new house, a bigger job and the can will get kicked down the road. When I lived in San Francisco, the Governor Gavin Newsom was the Mayor. Kamala the City Attorney. Then it was his campaign of “Care not Cash” to stop the tide of vagrancy and tragedy that existed on the streets. It was the same as it is now just different. They now live in bigger houses with bigger jobs. The reality is that we are the ones who must do something and that is perhaps accept that what was then is not now. The same things that drew you there are not the reasons others are there. Sex, drugs and rock and roll have a place but maybe in memories not in the streets. The Folsom Street fair a bizarre weekend festival of kink and debauchery should not happen anymore or move it indoors with better control and less visability. The San Francisco annual run with carts and nudity needs to end. And with that accept that those drawn there now may not have the same values or beliefs but may be exploiting or in turn harming others with their presence. It was the same during the Floyd Marches how quickly professional criminals used the cover of them to do damage and with that the BLM idea became associated with that not its actual cause. See how the memory plays games and selectively picks the issues that triggers the most base of emotions, FEAR.

So what is the solution? Well we can start to rethink what it means to massively house and treat those who refuse to be treated. We called them Institutions for the Mentally Ill. They were horrible but that was then and this is now. Can we not find ways today in which to improve them? Use the failures of the past as a teaching lesson in which to learn and grow? Uh no, that is hard and shit. We also need to start mental health assessments much early on. By Grade 5/6 all children should be assessed for not only intellectual capability’s and/or learning disabilities but for mental health disorders. And with that we need fully funded mental health clinics in schools with again referrals to behavioral issues that perhaps are a signal of a larger crisis. Wonder why 18 year old boys are taking to the streets with guns, that may answer some of those questions. Oh we cannot do that, its too hard. Or are we afraid we will find out the truth? This story about a young woman’s quest to get a mental health clinic at her school brought all the angry afraid parents to the yard to protest. Me thinks one doth protest too much.

I believe John Oliver sums up the ways schools are funded and of course the move to Police up and Militarize the schools will go well. And this is America – AFRAID and in turn utterly immobile. So nothing will change.

With that I reprint the story of the Number 15. Ride safe.

Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15

As American cities struggle to recover from the pandemic, Denver’s problems spill over onto its buses

By Eli Saslow June 6, 2022 The Washington Post

19 minDENVER — Suna Karabay touched up her eye makeup in the rearview mirror and leaned against the steering wheel of the bus to say her morning prayers. “Please, let me be patient,” she said. “Let me be generous and kind.” She walked through the bus to make her final inspection: floor swept, seats cleaned, handrails disinfected, gas tank full for another 10-hour shift on the city’s busiest commercial road. She drove to her first stop, waited until exactly 5:32 a.m., and opened the doors.

“Good morning!” she said, as she greeted the first passenger of the day, a barefoot man carrying a blanket and a pillow. He dropped 29 cents into the fare machine for the $3 ride. “That’s all I got,” he said, and Suna nodded and waved him onboard.

“Happy Friday,” she said to the next people in line, including a couple with three plastic garbage bags of belongings and a large, unleashed dog. “Service pet,” one of the owners said. He fished into his pocket and pulled out a bus pass as the dog jumped onto the dashboard, grabbed a box of Kleenex, and began shredding tissues on the floor.

“Service animal?” Suna asked. “Are you sure?”

“What’d I tell you already?” the passenger said. “Just drive the damn bus.”

She turned back to face the windshield and pulled onto Colfax Avenue, a four-lane road that ran for more than 30 miles past the state capitol, through downtown, and toward the Rocky Mountains. Forty-five years old, she’d been driving the same route for nearly a decade, becoming such a fixture of Denver’s No. 15 bus line that her photograph was displayed on the side of several buses — a gigantic, smiling face of a city Suna no longer recognized in the aftermath of the pandemic. The Denver she encountered each day on the bus had been transformed by a new wave of epidemics overwhelming major cities across the country. Homelessness in Denver was up by as much as 50 percent since the beginning of the pandemic. Violent crime had increased by 17 percent, murders had gone up 47 percent, some types of property crime had nearly doubled, and seizures of fentanyl and methamphetamine had quadrupled in the past year.

She stopped the bus every few blocks to pick up more passengers in front of extended-stay motels and budget restaurants, shifting her eyes between the road ahead and the rearview mirror that showed all 70 seats behind her. In the past two years, Denver-area bus drivers had reported being assaulted by their passengers more than 145 times. Suna had been spit on, hit with a toolbox, threatened with a knife, pushed in the back while driving and chased into a restroom during her break. Her windshield had been shattered with rocks or glass bottles three times. After the most recent incident, she’d written to a supervisor that “this job now is like being a human stress ball.” Each day, she absorbed her passengers’ suffering and frustration during six trips up and down Colfax, until, by the end of the shift, she could see deep indentations of her fingers on the wheel.

Now she stopped to pick up four construction workers in front of “Sunrise Chinese Restaurant — $1.89 a Scoop.” She pulled over near a high school for a teenager, who walked onto the bus as she continued to smoke.

“Sorry. You can’t do that,” Suna said.

“It’s just weed.”

“Not on here,” Suna said. The girl tossed the joint onto the sidewalk and banged her fist into the first row of seats, but Suna ignored her. She kept driving as the bus filled behind her and then began to empty out after she passed through downtown. “Last stop,” she announced, a few minutes before 7 a.m. She was scheduled for a six-minute break before turning around to begin her next trip up Colfax, but when she looked in the rearview mirror, there were still seven people sleeping on the bus. Lately, about a quarter of her riders were homeless. The bus was their destination, so they rode until someone forced them to get off. “Sorry. Everyone out,” Suna said again, speaking louder, until the only passenger left was a man slumped across two seats in the second row. Suna got up to check on him.

“Sir?” she said, tapping his shoulder. He had an open wound on his ankle, and his leg was shaking. “Sir, are you okay?”

He opened his eyes. He coughed, spit on the floor, and looked around the empty bus. “We make it to Tulsa?” he asked.

“No. This is Denver. This is the 15 line.”

The passenger stumbled onto his feet. “Do you want me to call you an ambulance?” Suna asked, but he shook his head and started limping toward the doors.

“Okay. Have a good day,” Suna said. He held up his middle finger and walked off the bus.

Five days a week she drove back and forth on the same stretch of Colfax Avenue, stopping 38 times each way, completing every trip in a scheduled time of 72 minutes as she navigated potholes by memory and tried to make sense of what was happening to her passengers and to the city that she loved. She’d started reading books about mental illness and drug abuse, hoping to remind herself of what she believed: Addiction was a disease. Homelessness was a moral crisis. The American working class had been disproportionately crushed by covid-19, rising inflation and skyrocketing housing costs, and her passengers were among the victims. She thought about what her father had told her, when she was 19 years old and preparing to leave her family in Turkey to become an immigrant in the United States. He’d said that humanity was like a single body of water, in which people were made up from the same substance and then collected into different cups. This was her ocean. It was important not to judge.

And for her first several years in Denver, that kind of compassion had come easily to her. She felt liberated driving the city bus, which Muslim women weren’t allowed to do back home in Ankara. She loved the diversity of her passengers and built little relationships with her regulars: Ethiopian women who cleaned offices downtown, elementary-school children who wrote her thank you notes, Honduran day laborers who taught her phrases in Spanish, and medical students who sometimes asked about her heart ailment. But then the pandemic closed much of Denver, and even though Suna had never missed a day of work, many of her regulars had begun to disappear from the bus. Two years later, ridership across the city was still down by almost half, and a new wave of problems had arrived in the emptiness of urban centers and public transit systems, not just in Denver but all across the country.

Philadelphia was reporting an 80 percent increase in assaults aboard buses. St. Louis was spending $53 million on a new transit security plan. The transportation union president in Tucson said the city’s buses had become “a mobile refuse frequented by drug users, the mentally ill, and violent offenders.” The sheriff of Los Angeles County had created a new transit unit to keep passengers from having to “step over dead bodies or people injecting themselves.” And, meanwhile, Suna was compulsively scanning her rearview mirror, watching for the next crisis to emerge as she began another shift.

Two teenagers were burning something that looked like tinfoil in the back of the bus. A woman in a wheelchair was hiding an open 32-ounce can of beer in her purse and drinking from it with a straw. A construction worker holding a large road sign that read “SLOW” sat down in the first row next to a teenage girl, who scooted away toward the window.

“This sign isn’t meant for me and you,” the construction worker told the teenager, as Suna idled at a red light and listened in. “We can take it fast.”

“I’m 15,” the girl said. “I’m in high school.”

“That’s okay.”

Suna leaned out from her seat and yelled: “Leave her alone!”

“All right. All right,” the construction worker said, holding up his hands in mock surrender. He waited a moment and turned back to the teenager. “But do you got an older sister?”

Suna tried to ignore him and looked out the windshield at the snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the high-rises of the city. She hadn’t been downtown on her own time since the beginning of the pandemic, and lately, she preferred to spend entire weekends reading alone in her apartment, isolating herself from the world except for occasional phone calls with her family in Turkey. “I used to be an extrovert, but now I’m exhausted by people,” Suna had told her sister. Increasingly, her relationship with Denver was filtered through the windshield of the bus, as she pulled over at stops she associated mostly with traumas and police reports during the pandemic.

There was Havana Street, where, a few months earlier, a woman in mental distress had shattered the windshields of two No. 15 buses, including Suna’s, within five minutes; and Billings Street, where, in the summer of 2021, a mentally unstable passenger tried to punch a crying toddler, only to be tackled and then shot in the chest by the toddler’s father; and Dayton Street, where Suna had once asked a man in a red bikini to stop smoking fentanyl, and he’d shouted “Here’s your covid, bitch!” before spitting in her face; and Downing, where another No. 15 driver had been stabbed nearby with a three-inch blade; and Broadway, where, on Thanksgiving, Suna had picked up a homeless man who swallowed a handful of pills, urinated on the bus, and asked her to call an ambulance, explaining that he’d poisoned himself so he could spend the holiday in a hospital with warm meals and a bed.

“Hey, driver! Hit the gas,” a passenger yelled from a few rows behind her. “We’re late. You’re killing me.”

She stared ahead at a line of cars and checked the clock. She was two minutes behind schedule. She inched up toward the brake lights in front of her and tried to focus on a mural painted on the side of a nearby building of a woman playing the violin.

“Hey! Do you speak English?” the passenger yelled. “Get your ass moving or get back to Mexico.”

She kneaded her hands into the steering wheel. She counted her breaths as they approached the next stop, North Yosemite Street, which had been the site of another episode of violence captured on security camera several months earlier. An intoxicated and emaciated 57-year-old woman had jumped out in front of a moving No. 15 bus, shouted at the driver to stop, and then pushed her way onboard. She’d started cursing at other passengers, pacing up and down the aisle until a man twice her size stood up in the back of the bus and punched her in the face with a closed fist, slamming her to the floor. “Who ain’t never been knocked out before?” he asked, as the woman lay unconscious in the aisle, and then he stood over her as the other passengers sat in their seats and watched. “Here’s one more,” he said, stomping hard on her chest. He grabbed the woman by the ankle and flung her off the bus, leaving her to die of blunt-force trauma on the sidewalk. “We can keep riding though,” one of the other passengers had told the driver, moments later. “We got to go to work, man.”

Now, Suna pulled over at the next stop and glanced into the rearview mirror. The belligerent passenger was out of his seat and moving toward her. She turned her eyes away from him and braced herself. He banged his fist into the windshield. He cursed and then exited the bus.

Suna closed her eyes for a moment and waited as three more passengers climbed onboard. “Thanks for riding,” she told them, and she shifted the bus back into drive.

Each night after she finished making all 228 stops on Colfax, Suna went home to the silence of her apartment, burned sage incense, drank a calming herbal tea and tried to recover for her next shift. Meanwhile, many of her passengers ended up spending their nights at the last stop on the No. 15 route, Union Station, the newly renovated, $500 million gem of the city’s transportation system and now also the place the president of the bus drivers’ union called a “lawless hellhole.”

The station’s long indoor corridor had become the center of Denver’s opioid epidemic and also of its homelessness crisis, with as many as a few hundred people sleeping on benches on cold nights. The city had tried removing benches to reduce loitering, but people with nowhere to go still slept on the floor. Authorities tried closing all of the station’s public bathrooms because of what the police called “a revolving door of drug use in the stalls,” but that led to more people going to the bathroom and using drugs in the open. The police started to arrest people at record rates, making more than 1,000 arrests at Union Station so far this year, including hundreds for drug offenses. But Colorado lawmakers had decriminalized small amounts of drug possession in 2019, meaning that offenders were sometimes cited with a misdemeanor for possessing up to four grams of fentanyl — enough for nearly 2,000 lethal doses — and then were able to return to Union Station within a few hours.

The city’s latest attempt at a solution was a mental health crisis team of four clinicians who worked for the Regional Transportation District, and one night a counselor named Mary Kent walked into Union Station holding a small handbag with the overdose antidote Narcan, a tourniquet and referral cards to nearby homeless shelters.

“Can I help you in any way?” she said to a woman who was pushing a shopping cart while holding a small knife. The woman gestured at the air and yelled something about former president Barack Obama’s dog.

“Do you need anything? Can we help support you?” Kent asked again, but the woman muttered to herself and turned away.

Kent walked from the train corridor to the bus platform and then back again during her shift, helping to de-escalate one mental health crisis after the next. A woman was shouting that she was 47-weeks pregnant and needed to go to the hospital. A teenager was running naked through the central corridor, until Kent helped calm her down and a transit police officer coaxed her into a shirt. During a typical 12-hour shift, Kent tried to help people suffering from psychosis, schizophrenia, withdrawal, bipolar disorder, and substance-induced paranoia. She connected many of them with counseling and emergency shelter, but they just as often refused her help. Unless they posed an immediate threat to themselves or others, there wasn’t much she could do.

An elderly man with a cane tapped her on the shoulder. “Somebody stole my luggage,” he said, and for a few minutes Kent spoke with him and tried to discern if he had imagined the suitcases or if they had in fact been stolen, both of which seemed plausible. “Let’s see if we can find a security officer,” Kent said, but by then the man no longer seemed focused on the missing suitcases, and instead, he asked the question she got most of all.

“Where’s the closest public bathroom?” he said.

“Oh boy,” she said, before explaining that the one in Union Station was closed, the one in the nearby public park had been fenced off to prevent loitering, the one in the hotel next door had a full-time security guard positioned at the entrance, and the one in the nearby Whole Foods required a receipt as proof of a purchase in the store. The only guaranteed way to protect a space from the homelessness crisis was to limit access, so Union Station had also recently approved a plan to create a ticketed-only area inside the station to restrict public use starting in 2023.

Kent walked outside onto the bus platform, smelled the chemical burn of fentanyl, and followed it through a crowd of about 25 homeless people to a woman who was smoking, pacing and gesticulating at an imaginary audience. A few security officers walked toward the woman, and she moved away and shouted something about the devil. Kent pulled a referral card from her bag, went over to the woman and introduced herself as a clinician.

“What can we do to support you right now?” she asked.

“Nothing,” the woman said. She walked to the other end of the platform, threw a few punches at the air and boarded the next bus.

The job, as Suna understood it, was to drive and keep driving, no matter what else was happening to the city, so the next morning, she pulled up to her first stop at 5:32 a.m. and then made her way along Colfax, stopping every few blocks on her way downtown. Billings Street. Havana Street. Dayton. Downing. Broadway. She finished her first trip and turned around to start again. A woman with an expired bus pass yelled at her in Vietnamese. Two passengers got into an argument over an unsmoked cigarette lying on the floor. Broadway, Downing, Dayton, Havana, Billings. She shifted her eyes back and forth from the rearview mirror to the road as she made her second trip, her third, her fourth, her fifth, until finally she reached the end of the line at 4:15 p.m. and turned around to begin her final trip of the day. She stopped at Decatur station to pick up three women, closed the doors, and began to pull away from the stop.

“Hey!” a man shouted, standing outside at the bus stop. He wore a basketball jersey and a backward cap. He banged on the bus and Suna stopped and opened the door. “Hey!” the man repeated, as he climbed onboard, cursing at her. “What the hell are you doing pulling away? I was standing right there.”

“Watch your language,” she said. “Where’s your bus fare?”

He paid half the fare and then cursed at her again. He walked to the first row of seats, sat down and glared at her.

“What are you staring at?” he yelled. “Go. Drive the damn bus.”

“I’m not your pet,” she said. “You don’t tell me what to do.”

She pulled out from the bus stop and looked away from the rearview mirror toward the mountains. She counted her breaths and tried to think of what her father had said about humanity being a single body of water. She’d dealt with more difficult passengers during the pandemic, including some earlier that same morning, but that was 11 hours and 203 stops ago, and as the passenger continued to rant, she could feel her patience beginning to give way.

“You’re so stupid,” the passenger said, and she ignored him.

“You idiot. You’re just a driver,” he shouted, and she pulled up to an intersection, hit the brakes, and turned back to him. “Why are you calling me names?” she asked. “F-you. F-that. You don’t know a single good word.” She told him to get off the bus or she would call the police. “Go right ahead,” he said, and he leaned back in his seat as she picked up her phone and gave her location to the officer. She hung up, squeezed the steering wheel, and continued driving toward her next stop.

“You dumb ass,” he said. “You bitch.”

“Just shut up!” she shouted. “You can’t talk to me that way.” Her hands were shaking against the wheel and she could feel the months of exhaustion and belittlement and anger and sadness welling up into her eyes, until she knew the one thing she couldn’t do for even a moment longer was to drive. She pulled over to a safe place on the side of the road. She turned off the ignition and put on her hazard lights. She called a supervisor and said that she was done driving for the day, and that she would be back for her next shift in the morning.

She opened the exit door and turned back to the passenger. “Get off,” she said, blinking back tears, pleading this time. He stared back at her and shook his head.

“Fine,” she said, and she stood up from her seat and walked off the bus