A woman sits on the bus driver's armrest greeting passengers

Maybe I'm being a bit of a prude, and insufficiently open-minded. And I know it can get boring when you're driving a bus late at night.

But it just seems somewhat ... inappropriate to have someone sitting with you in the driver's seat as you're driving the bus. Not only does it look rather unprofessional when people start to board the bus, but I'm pretty sure the people who tested the bus for safety don't recommend people sit there.

There's a seat right by the front door, and at this particular moment it's unoccupied. Maybe you can sit there instead. Don't worry, your conversation shouldn't suffer.

UPDATE (Oct. 2): After having a similar experience - this time with children - Gazette reporter Anne Sutherland has written a story about bus driver behaviour, which appeared on Page A3 of Saturday's paper:

Bus driver story by Anne Sutherland on Page A3 of Saturday's paper

The photo becomes officially my first freelance photo for The Gazette. Of course, had I known that would happen when I took it, I would have tried to make it a lot better (and taken it at a higher resolution).

Me!

The story also quotes me briefly about my experience:

Here’s another, I hope, rare example of bad behaviour by bus drivers:

Montreal blog Fagstein posted a photo taken Sept. 17 of a female passenger riding on the armrest of a male driver’s seat.

“This was on the 361 bus at 2:30 in the morning,” said blog author Steve Faguy, who works as a copy editor at The Gazette. “The woman was sitting there the whole time, about 30 minutes. If the guy had to do some kind of emergency manoeuvre, he can’t do it with her on his lap.”

New media is awesome and all, and I work at the Gazette and put together a bunch of pages every day, but there's still something about seeing a piece of paper with my name on it delivered to over a hundred thousand households that makes me a bit giddy. Running my first photo about a third of a page (I've cropped out the ads) on A3 of the Saturday paper ads icing to the cake.

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The STM has refused to retrofit their buses in order to remove these threats to our (taller) children, even after discovering that people can get hit with them.

This is about safety. The ability of a bus driver to look at himself or look back at roads he's already driven through should not get in the way of keeping our streets safe for pedestrians.

We must not rest until our buses are mirror-free.

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To most people, this is just a bus. The kind that will take you to work on a daily basis.

But to a select few, this rust bucket is something special. A group of about 30 public transit fans chartered this RTL bus for a day last weekend, just for fun. I tell their story in today's paper.

I first met the transit inclined a few years ago, and went along with a similar charter trip in 2006. Then, the group chartered one of the STM's oldest active buses, No. 59-019. At the time, there were suggestions the bus was near retirement and might not see regular service again. This was billed as one last ride on one of the few remaining STM buses with a non-electronic rollsign.

I've always wanted to write about these guys (though there aren't many stereotypes that tie them together, they are almost universally male), but I never got a chance to before now.

This is Shanake Mario Seneviratne, aka SMS. He organizes the charters.

This is Tristan Roy, the driver. He's a transit fan as well, and volunteered to drive the bus around for free. That helped reduce the cost, as well as provide a few perks.

By coincidence, during one of the first stops at LaSalle metro (which used to be a terminus for some then-STRSM bus routes), there was No. 60-013 sitting a few stops ahead ready to do a run of the No. 12 Île des Soeurs route. The 60-series buses date back to 1990 and are among the oldest STM buses still in service (though a year younger than the 59-series). 59- and 60-series buses are few and far between, especially outside of weekday rush hour. Seeing this bus on a Saturday morning is unusual, hence all the excitement.

This plate, installed above the driver's window, is hard to make out, but places the date of manufacture at November 1989.

Though the hope is always that beautiful sunny weather will prevail, rain was on hand for a good portion of the charter, necessitating umbrellas and camera-protection gear.

At one point, Tristan gets out and wipes away the rain off the front rollsign of the bus. Unfortunately that did nothing for the fog on the other side of the glass.

Operating the manual rollsign is the funnest part of this activity. Before the electronic signs were installed, drivers would have to press a button that scrolled up and down through two rolls of digits and a roll of names (the latter could take forever getting from A to Z). Because the sign is almost 20 years old, there are plenty of names of routes that no longer exist. Some of the stops involved going to places no longer served by the RTL and setting up the rollsign to display the name of a route that no longer exists.

The rollsign also has a few typos.

One of the charter participants takes a photo of the bus at LaSalle metro.

At the St. Hubert garage, Tristan lined up three types of buses the RTL currently uses. On the left, a Van Hool AG300 articulated low-floor bus, used mostly on the 45 express bus between Terminus Centre-Ville and Panama terminus. On the right, a Novabus LFS low-floor bus, which is what most of the STM fleet is currently made of.

This is Mike Boone. Apparently no relation to this Mike Boone. This guy is from Belleville, Ont., one of many who made the trek from far for the opportunity to explore with fellow transit fans. What he's doing, by the way, is not recommended while buses are in motion.

Here's Boone again taking photos. While everyone was taking photos of the bus, trying not to get anyone else in their shots (and staying out of the shots of others), I was focusing on taking photos of the transit fans, who were the subjects of my story.

If this kind of thing appeals to you, be sure to check out the Canadian Public Transit Discussion Board (in English) and MétrodeMontréal forums (in French), as well as the YUL bus charters official website.

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UPDATE (April 10): The Chronicle reports the STM says it's a coincidence (duh).

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The text, in case you can't read it:

COOLING IT  Montreal Transit Corp. crew and a city firefighter check a 211 bus that caught fire outside the Lionel Groulx métro station yesterday. The fire was caused by mechanical problems, police said, and no one was hurt.

Death trap? What death trap?

(As I mentioned to a concerned fellow traveller yesterday, nobody is seriously injured in these kinds of fires, since they take a while to get this intense and the buses are pretty well designed to be able to get everyone out quickly. Still, spontaneous combustion is a concern.)

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Back in 1996, it was seen as the biggest leap in Montreal transportation in decades. The STCUM was replacing the General Motors ... MCI ... NovaBus Classic series with a new, revolutionary low-floor (LFS) bus being developed by St-Eustache-based NovaBus. The new buses would be more accessible, both for people with low mobility who would now have one step up instead of four, and people on wheelchairs who would have a ramp at the back door and a place to park their wheelchair safely.

NovaBus wasn't the only low-floor player, nor were they the best. But they were Quebec-based, which meant it was politically favourable to buy from them and have the buses produced locally, and tax incentives made it much more economical to buy from them.

The problems with the bus began rather quickly. First, there was the minor issue of the brake lines freezing in winter, which caused them to accelerate when the brakes were applied. Then there was their propensity to randomly catch fire. And a host of other problems that mechanics are having to deal with: the wheelchair ramps don't work (the STM still encourages use of their adapted transit network), the back-door sensor doesn't work reliably, two seats in the front faced a wall behind the driver (causing clients to hit their heads when the bus came to a sudden stop).

But the STM kept buying the buses. 480 of them over three years. After that, the STM stopped buying buses due to budget constraints, and NovaBus revamped their design. The second-generation LFS buses, which the STM started buying in 2001, solved most of those problems, but there aren't enough of them on the road to take the first batch (or for that matter, 6-7 years worth of Classics) out of service. So we're stuck with them.

And the problems keep coming. For the past two days, about 60 of them were taken off the street for various problems, cutting service during rush hours by about 1 per cent. (via mtlweblog) It's gotten so bad that the STM prefers using the older Classic buses longer than the first-generation LFS, since they're still working fine.

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The report includes some very common-sense ideas: Extending the blue line metro East to Pie-IX and then Anjou, extending the orange line northwest to the Bois-Franc train station, connecting bicycle paths across the island, adding bicycle parking and adding express buses and reserved bus lanes to major arteries.

But just in case you're hopeful that any of these initiatives will see the light of day, remember that it also includes a promise to finish the Cavendish Extension. Yeah.

As ambitious as the plan is, it's not as crazy as tramway fetishists Projet Montréal's plan (PDF), which proposes putting tramways on the highway and all the way out to Ile Bizard. (Well, some people at least think it's worth the trouble)

Hidden in the sea of Montreal's plan is another common-sense idea that I think would make a huge impact toward getting people to use public transit, especially in suburbs: Make express buses run all day. It works brilliantly for the 211, why not have something similar for the other suburbs?

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