Muni Has Vehicles; Now All They Need are Drivers
One Monday back in late January, Muni discovered that not enough drivers had come into work that day, so they could only send out 101...
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Jamison Wieser said:
March 11, 2009 10:58 AM
Reply
I'm not sure why a shortage of drivers would cause two-car trains to be reduced to one-car since it still takes the same number of operators, there's probably something else going on too.
It's more complicated than just Muni needing more drivers, which it does. Muni only hires bus operators because of a union agreement that only allows an operator to apply to be trained to drive a train after they've driven a bus for 3 years. I don't know if there's any truth to this, but I've heard snickering comments that this keeps away a lot of drivers who apply to BART instead because they have no interest in driving a bus.
As MattyMatt said, it takes about 6 months to train a bus operator to drive and once they get passed the class room that becomes one-on-one with a teacher in a vehicle, which is also a vehicle that's not available for service while it's being used for training.
Not everyone passes after that six month, and not everyone who goes through it decides they want to drive a train after all and would rather stay with bus operations.
Even if we have enough drivers, what about support staff? Other supporting jobs are frozen and as people retire or leave those positions are not being refilled. Muni Metro East (MME) the brand new, state-of-the-art rail yard built along the T-Line sits empty because only 10% of the staff for it was filled before the freeze went into effect. We may get to a point we have enough drivers, but don't have enough vehicles working for them to drive.