Nine years is a long time to spend on the bus if you don't love transit.
Fortunately, Len Seredynski does. The retired director of laboratory medicine at the University of Alberta Hospital has been driving a St. Albert Transit bus for about nine years now and has no plans to stop anytime soon. "[I'll drive] as long as I like it and as long as I can do it."
Seredynski is one of the 76 bus drivers set to get a little attention this month as the city holds its first ever I Love Transit Week. The event, meant to promote transit in St. Albert, will give residents a chance to share their transit stories and win free rides for the summer.
You'll also get a chance to take a bus simulator for a spin next Wednesday, says Bob McDonald, director of transit. "It's like a big video game," he says, and you have to dodge snow, rain, traffic and blowouts. "I ended up going across the road into the ditch," he admits when describing his turn in the simulator. "That's why I'm not driving."
Behind the wheel
I Love Transit Week is meant as a thank you to all drivers and riders, McDonald says. As part of the celebration, the St. Albert Transit website will be featuring profiles of drivers and staff members, and asking the public for their transit stories.
You have to be a special kind of person to drive a bus, McDonald says, able to deal with the stress of schedules, traffic, and rowdy passengers.
For Bill Sharp, the bus was something to do after he retired as a sergeant from the Devon RCMP detachment eight years ago. "I wanted to do something different and I didn't want to just stay home." He liked driving and talking to people, so he joined the city's transit service about eight years ago. "I don't find it stressful. There's not a lot of paperwork and it's not a heavy responsibility."
Seredynski says he got into buses after the cuts of the Klein years. "These are our retirement jobs," he says of himself and Sharp. He loved to drive and wasn't interested in consulting, so he tried driving a school bus for a few years.
He liked driving so much that he volunteered to drive a convoy of new buses into town from Alaska. "It was quite a challenge because there was this big snowfall during that period," he says, and he had to get home before the end of Easter weekend. "We slept and ate on the buses."
His first bus with St. Albert Transit happened to be the last one in the fleet without power steering. It was -30 C in December, he says, and you really had to crank on the wheel to move it. It's tough at first to thread a 60-foot bus into traffic, he says, but it's no different than a regular car once you get used to it. "The bigger the better. I enjoy big buses."
Next stop?
Transit staff will hold a free barbecue at St. Albert Place on Wednesday starting at 5:30 p.m., McDonald says. Visitors will have a chance to win prizes such as free bus rides for the rest of summer. In addition to the simulator, people will also get a look at the city's new automatic bus locators.
In the old days, McDonald says, tracking buses was a matter of CB radios and educated guesses. Managers never had an exact idea of where a bus was or when it would arrive and the radio chatter distracted drivers.
The new system, which has been around for a year and a half, displays the exact speed and location of each bus on a real-time computer map of the city, allowing for better scheduling. Early next year, McDonald says, riders will be able to use this system through their cellphones to find out exactly when their bus will reach their stop. "It'll be real-time information."
Visit ridestat.ca for details on I Love Transit Week.
