Anger and heartbreak on Bus No. 15

[mahatmakanejeeves]

NATIONAL

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 at 7:59 a.m. EDT



Suna Karabay operates a No. 15 city bus on Colfax Avenue in Denver in May. Karabay, a native of Turkey, has driven the route for nearly 10 years. (Stephen Speranza for The Washington Post)

DENVER — 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.”

{snip}

By Eli Saslow
Eli Saslow is a reporter at The Washington Post. He won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for his year-long series about food stamps in America. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 2013, 2016 and 2017. Twitter https://twitter.com/elisaslow

[love_katz]

1. I spent over 23 years driving a school bus.

As bad as it was, it was not anywhere near as bad as what this woman is enduring. Most of our societal decay is thanks to the misnamed "compassionate conservatism ". No affordable health care, jobs without a livable wage, cost of rent through the roof, untreated mental health issues, hopelessness and despair leading to drug addiction, crime and violence. How can anyone still buy the bogus lies of the GQP party? what

[in2herbs]

2. As much as it will make heads explode -- even some heads here on DU -- Universal Basic

Income is the only thing that will pull some of these people out of their despair and offer them hope.

Any tax break for the wealthy should be tied to UBI. When "they" (1%) get theirs we also need to get ours.

[progree]

3. Some background from the article on Denver --

https://archive.ph/WUCsc
various excerpts

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.

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.”

... “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.... ((I'd guess a lot of her 6 minute "breaks" end up being consumed that way -Progree))

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.