Vancouver bus driver eliminates dangerous left turn
Vancouver bus driver Paul Stewart and his union have triumphed in a years-long campaign to eliminate a dangerous left turn from a downtown bus route. Here’s his story.
I had always disliked the left turn from West Georgia onto Chilco. It just seemed like a stupid place to turn left, across three lanes of oncoming traffic. The Stanley Park trolley bus has turned there for decades, to enter a loop to make its return trip. The oncoming traffic is leaving the park, travelling at 60 kilometres per hour or more, and many of the drivers are tourists, unfamiliar with local traffic. I believed that if something wasn’t done, someone would eventually die in an accident, either in my bus, or someone else’s.
On the safety agenda—for 20 years
After I first witnessed a near-accident at the turn I asked my union’s safety committee members what they thought of it. They were all aware of the left turn problem, and explained the difficulties in changing the route. As I found out, the issue had been on the safety committee’s agenda for more than twenty years.
Next I went to my supervisor, who said he understood the problem, because he had been a driver for 12 years, and disliked the turn. However, the next day he told me that his boss didn’t feel there was a problem.
I was furious. All the drivers seemed to realize there was a safety problem. So did the safety committee. Yet the bus managers refused to budge. I was beginning to believe that the inertia on this issue was so great that someone was going to die before there would be a change.
Refusal to turn left
So I asked my union rep, Jim Houlahan, why we didn’t just refuse to make the turn, and force the bus company to change it. Jim said it was a classic Catch-22: if you sign up for the route, you can’t refuse to make the turn, but you’re also not allowed to refuse to sign up. So I asked him, “Jim, if I refuse to make that turn, will you, in your position, and the union, support me?”
Jim got that ‘are-you-sure-you-know-what-you’re-getting-yourself-into’ look on his face, then said, “Yes, absolutely.”
Bus driving is a stressful job. But it got a lot more stressful over the next few months, as I began refusing to make the dangerous left turn at the Chilco Loop. The first time, I radioed my controller in advance, asking him to short-turn me downtown so I wouldn’t have to make the left turn. He refused, but a ground supervisor let me. The next time I stopped at the turn and parked my bus. So they sent a supervisor to see me.
“This is simply a stupid place for a left turn,” I told him. “There are too many cars coming around that corner, and most of them are going too fast.” Eventually, they called someone from the Workers Compensation Board, to rule on whether the turn was safe or not. The WCB guy simply said it wasn’t his jurisdiction because the street wasn’t a workplace.
I told my supervisor, “I will never turn here again.”
ICTU/CALM