Matinternet has a piece about an Info690 report that plagiarizes (without attribution) an OMGclusive article in the Journal de Montréal this morning that says bus drivers in Montreal are doing a lot of overtime, a few of them even doubling their salary with all the extra work they do.
I guess this is news for some people. If you’ve ever seen an STM driver’s schedule (four hours on, two hours off, three hours on, etc.), you’d start to understand a bit better.
The articles, of course, offer no solutions to this problem. The STM is doing the best they can to hire more drivers, but that takes time, and the number of retirements is creeping upward at the same time as the transit agency wants to add more service.
This is not new. I read about a story like this 10 years ago about Laval bus drivers and at that time, they were making 90 000$ a year. In one case it was a driver who was on disability and since all he did was take the buses from the bus terminal to the garage all of his time was counted as OT. But then Laval bus drivers are special.