Bus Drivers of Boro Park: Unite!

Every weekday morning, 275 sets of wheels go round, round, round in Boro Park, driving the economy, schedule and everything else in the densely populated area of less than three square miles.

Workdays cannot begin before their arrival, blood pressures rise and fall based on their acceleration, and yeshivos can have an entire morning wrecked by their delay.

Those wheels, spinning under the school buses which ferry most of Boro Park’s estimated 50,000 children to yeshivah and school, are perhaps the most critical movables in the neighborhood during the 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. window.

However, due to a new law which allowed many yeshivos to purchase their own buses for the first time, school transportation issues of concern that have coasted until now have suddenly swooped to the fore.

From the approximately 150 buses that prowled Boro Park’s streets two years ago, the number has nearly doubled this year. And the more than 275 buses now snarling traffic to get the kids from Destination A to Destination B have themselves become a force to be reckoned with.

But a joint interview with managers of busing operations for three large Boro Park mosdos makes it clear that that power has never before been harnessed in any meaningful way.

Beri Wolner of Klausenburg, Shulem Lichtman of Vizhnitz and Yosef Reich of Bobov told Hamodia that the clash with garbage trucks, followed shortly afterward by a recent ticketing blitz, jolted the bus driver community into uniting for the first time.

All three made it clear that the interview was in the name of the new group, which they call the Bus Transit Association, representing the drivers of all 42 mosdos in Boro Park, not in the name of the mosad itself.

The group appointed nine of the bus managers to represent them. That smaller troop quickly identified three main areas of concern: safety, parking and — the issue which was most recently in the news — getting sanitation trucks off the road during prime hour.

The jump in new school buses on the road is thanks to the new transportation law passed in 2011 by state Sen. Simcha Felder, a Democrat caucusing with the Republican majority who represents the district.

The law, whose main thrust allowed for the first time for late homecoming yeshivah students to have access to free busing, also permitted parents to allot their busing funds given by the state directly to their children’s yeshivah. Previously, unionized bus companies were hired by the state to drive eligible students, with the school having no say over them.

Felder said that the problems cropping up over busing are a natural outcome of a burgeoning population of a neighborhood that is nearing 150,000 residents.

“This is a good problem to have,” Felder said. “My free transportation legislation is clearly a success; it helps many more yeshivah parents directly. It saves them thousands of dollars, ensures that their kids are safe going and coming from school, many in new state-of-the-art buses.”

He added that while there are more than 100 new buses in Boro Park, the neighborhood itself has greatly expanded on all sides.

* * *

Bus drivers have always found their job to be a challenge. From finding parking for the vehicles at night to navigating busy streets with the neighborhood’s smallest residents in the back, and all while dealing with harried parents at the most stressful time of the day, they bear a tremendous responsibility.

For years, Lichtman says, bus managers have attempted to organize into a single bloc to work on issues that affect them all. But the sheer amount of work that goes into that sort of undertaking stopped it time and again.

The Association finally had its roots in early December with a meeting with the Sanitation Department over the trash collectors. Shortly afterward, when $15,000 worth of parking tickets was meted out to school buses in a single week, it galvanized them to join together to speak with one voice to the city.

As a first effort, the drivers opened a line of communication with the police department to get them to first call a single number before mass ticketing. That initial project’s success — the bus is gone within an hour of every phone call — convinced the group to turn the temporary coalition into a permanent alliance.

Since then, Wolner says, the Bus Transit Association “has taken over my life.”

Issues from garbage truck frustrations to educating parents about bus safety, and even how to share the bustling streets with seemingly placid city bus drivers are on the agenda. And then there is driver training on everything from how to evacuate a bus to dealing with ill children.

Already, Wolner says, the first CPR class has been held, and the New York Police Department and the federal Homeland Security department have agreed to provide training to drivers.

But the thorniest problem has been the garbage trucks, an issue first recently raised in October by Assemblyman Dov Hikind, and subsequently taken on by both Hikind and Councilman David Greenfield in meetings with the Sanitation Department.

Nobody is as familiar with garbage truck routines as the school bus drivers, whose nightmare is getting stuck behind one in the morning.

A partial solution was introduced in 2006 by Felder, then a city councilman, to block off to garbage trucks several blocks throughout Boro Park for an hour in the morning. Greenfield, in a meeting with Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia, suggested increasing the time to two hours and expanding it to more blocks.

In the view of the new Association, however, the time has come to completely bar trash collection from 7:30 to 9:30 in the morning.

“From our standpoint,” Lichtman said, “it’s the only solution.”

The group met several weeks ago with Garcia, who they said appeared committed to arrive at a resolution.

Garcia was invited to witness for herself the jams which result when garbage trucks and school buses compete for the same narrow slice of road. She did — and inadvertently provided the solution, Wolner said.

“She was invited to come down to Boro Park and see firsthand what is going on,” Wolner said. “For some odd reason, that day there were no garbage trucks in the neighborhood, besides one.”

Garcia, along with elected officials such as Hikind and Greenfield, strolled down 46th Street between 13th and 14th avenues — the nerve center of Bais Yaakov of Boro Park’s nearly two dozen buses. But there were no garbage trucks to be seen.

A single sanitation vehicle, on 15th Avenue and 50th Street, finally depicted for the commissioner the problem school bus drivers face on a daily basis. The traffic it caused was backed up all the way to 13th Avenue.

The contrast to the commissioner was clear: A solitary truck at the wrong time can mess up traffic for blocks.

* * *

Things that most other people wouldn’t notice, even those who drive regularly, are of tremendous frustration to bus drivers. They operate on an extremely tight schedule, and deal with angry mothers at each stop and nervous menahalim at their final destinations.

City buses that stop at corners on an angle while they deploy a ramp for riders who are wheelchair users to come up on, for example. The five or more minutes it takes until the buses are ready to move on leaves a wake of several school bus drivers frustrated that their city bus colleague had to block the entire intersection.

“Dov Hikind sent a letter to the MTA, but we haven’t seen results,” Wolner says. “We represent 50,000 children among all of us. We’re getting delayed; it’s affecting education; children get late to school. What can we do about it?”

“If one bus comes late in a school like Bnos Tzion [of Bobov],” Reich adds, “20 classes start late.”

Another major topic of concern is parking the buses for the night. While they used to park in public areas such as on McDonald Avenue or 21st Avenue, a crackdown due to safety concerns brought an end to that.

The association is now trying to get the city to rent them a huge parking lot for all its buses.

“We tried reaching out to a few different government agencies to see what we could work out,” Wolner said. “We’re still in the gray area, waiting for answers from this person, waiting for answers from that person, call me back tomorrow, call me back again, the holiday season.”

The proposal, they said, has precedent. Satmar in Williamsburg got a similar arrangement for a city-owned parking lot for its bus fleet.

* * *

At the same time, the Association is attempting the first-ever bus safety campaign. There have been several accidents involving school buses in recent years, with at least one fatality, R”l. They want to educate parents how to wait for the bus in the safest way and what to do if you come to the stop to find the bus pulling away.

Safety Tip No. 1: Don’t run after a moving bus, no matter how much you need your child on that bus.

When mothers miss a bus, Reich says, “they lose their mind.”

The father has to run to daven, kollel or work, and the mother has to get to work or begin her day at home. Having unexpected company — even if it is their dear zeeskeit — can upset their entire schedule.

“They don’t want to get stuck with a child at home [the entire day],” Wolner notes. “So sometimes they’ll start running after the bus and banging on the side of the bus.”

The best thing when you miss the bus, the three drivers say, is to call the school. The secretary may be able to arrange for a rerun or for the parent to bring the child to a certain street. Drivers themselves are not allowed to talk on their cell phones while driving, so they cannot give their number to parents. But they do have two-way radios, and are in constant contact with the school.

* * *

Boro Park’s population boom — about 5,000 babies are born each year — means that the Bus Transit Association’s work will be growing as well. Out of the estimated 50,000 children attending yeshivah and girls’ schools in Boro Park, about 60 percent get there by the extensive busing system. Each bus usually does two or three routes each day, carrying about 60 children each shift.

“In Boro Park,” says Felder, who grew up in the neighborhood, where his father was Rav of a shul on 18th Avenue, “you’re anyway living with traffic. And baruch Hashem, this is the cause of the traffic.”

This article appeared in print in the February 5th, 2015 edition of Hamodia.