In Front of the Yellow Line

Time Management

By Shawn Wells

I would like to take a moment to talk about schedules. I know what you’re thinking, I’ve already talked about that. But this time I’m not talking about the bus schedules, I’m talking about my own personal schedule. This is something that a lot of people don’t even consider. I’ve said all along that I love my job, but if there is one thing I miss from any of my previous jobs it is a stable schedule.

Being a bus driver, I definitely do not work a 9-5, Monday to Friday job. I rarely get holidays off unless they happen to fall on my scheduled days off.  There are some shifts I work where I may have to start at 4am or some shifts where I may have to work until 2am. But most importantly, the big thing I have to deal with is split shifts.

Not all bus drivers have to deal with split shifts, but most of us do. We do get to choose which shift we work, however it is all based on seniority. Straight shifts are the most popular and I’m not high enough on the ladder to get those shifts, yet. The majority of the bus drivers that you encounter are probably working split shifts. The reason of course being that it is during morning and afternoon rush hours that you need the most busses on the road. During rush hours there are close to 1000 busses on the road. Some of the most popular routes will have 5 or 10 minute frequency which means that for those routes alone there are dozens of busses.

That being said, a common misconception is that your bus driver just goes back and forth on the same route all day. Quite often this is definitely not the case. I regularly get shifts where I will be servicing several different routes in my day. Here is an example from the work that I do right now. Thursday and Friday I do the same work, which starts at 6:40 in the morning at the garage. I drive my bus, out of service, from there to Point A. I then drive a partial route (stub route) to Point B. Then I out of service and drive back to Point A just to do the exact same thing again. Then from Point B its back to the garage to end my morning at 9:00. Then I kill time until my second piece of work which starts at the garage at 1:31pm. (That’s right… 1:31. Not 1:30.) Now I get back into a bus and drive out of service to Point B and reverse what I did in the morning, driving the partial route to Point A. Then I switch routes and drive to Point C, go not in service and drive back to Point B. Do that partial route to Point A again, go not in service and drive to Point D and drive yet another route back and forth between Point D and Point C three times before calling it a day and heading to the garage to end my day at 6:37pm.

Confused? Welcome to the world I live. Even more surprising is that this is one of my less complicated days because all my work begins and ends at the garage. Some days I have to start on the road and take over a bus that’s already in service. And with that I have to know which direction I have to take over the bus so I know what side of the street to wait on. Many times, the place I start a shift isn’t the same place I end my shift. So, if I want my car waiting for me at the end of the day, I have to take a bus to my starting point. Or sometimes, I make deals with the other driver I’m relieving and drive their car to my start point. Or sometimes I begin and end on the road somewhere and have to park my car at that location.

There is a lot of planning involved in working this job. Never before in my life have I worked a job that takes this amount of forethought. Here’s something most people working don’t have to take into consideration when working their jobs; I have to plan my bathroom breaks. I have one route I work where I start downtown. From there I head to a transit center that doesn’t have a convenient washroom. If I need to go to the bathroom there, it takes 5 minutes round trip of just walking. So if I don’t have the time, I have to hold it until I get to my next transit center, an hour later. That means, if I don’t take a washroom break before I head downtown, I have to wait at least an hour and a half before I have another chance.

Even on the few occasions where I’ve been fortunate enough to get a non-split shift, you also have to realize that a bus driver gets no scheduled breaks. Sure, we sometimes have long layovers at some of our stops but even that counts on traffic. If traffic is thick, I don’t get my long break. No time to eat a lunch, no time for a number 2. For my lunches, I tend to pack stuff that is easy to eat at work. Like carrot sticks or bananas. Things like soup or spaghetti are not the easiest lunches to take. Cutlery=inconvenient. But above all else, nothing that’s going to give you bowel issues. Can’t throw off the bathroom schedule.

But I just plug along, enjoying my job, dealing with the weirdness of my schedule. Waiting for the day that my weekends will actually be on the weekends instead of Tuesday and Wednesday. And just putting in the time so that one day, I will have the seniority to choose the good shifts.

From in front of the yellow line, that’s how I see it.