I’ve been riding the buses a lot recently and have been wondering how the hell the drivers make it through an eight hour shift with only a couple five minute breaks. Especially when the drivers on my routes seem to spend most of those breaks reading crime novels or smoking cigarettes. Where do they find the time and place to pee during the workday?! These are the things I wonder about while riding the bus.
Well, according to the transit drivers union, that’s apparently an actual problem. Amid the list of job complaints spelled out in the pdf on the union website I stumbled across today is this gripe:
“Many runs are scheduled so that the operator must make the daily choice of making their passengers late or not going to the restroom. In one year alone, 225 TriMet operators had to run for the bushes because they couldn’t hold it any longer while another 254 report that they simply do not drink any fluids for the entirety of their 8-10 hour work day. Holding it and not drinking fluids over a long period of time is extremely detrimental to health. Having to ‘hold it’ is a serious distraction from safe driving.”
Indeed! How many TriMet crashes are the result of drivers furiously focusing on their bladder? Anyway, be extra nice to your next TriMet operator. They may be contemplating a run for the bushes.
I would file this under “WHY THE HELL ARE THERE NOT PUBLIC WCs EVERYWHERE?!!!”
Are my taxes buying civilization or not? I really feel sorry for the ladies. Europe seems to have a handle on this. We can’t seem to advance our culture. Pathetic.
That is hilarious. The breaks aren’t long to smoke a cigarette and go to the bathroom and so some people are holding it and then complaining about health problems resulting from that.
(No offense to the average bus driver, most of them are really good, but some of them seem like they couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag.)
We don’t have public toilets because of a historic problem with drug use, and of course, puritan attitudes to piss in this country.
Randy Leonard is seeking to change all this with his loos.
Look, there are some places that have coin-operated, self cleaning robot bathrooms. We cannot afford to be on the wrong side of history when it comes to robot bathrooms.
I think puritanism is more the obstacle than drug use since the technology to mitigate the latter has existed for decades.
Puritans. England didn’t want them and neither do I.
Tri-met drivers *pee in your mouth*. Really. You just didn’t notice.
Why not give people free ride vouchers in exchange for holding a cup or empty water bottle to their bus driver’s crotch region of needed?
Without robot bathrooms someone may steal our precious bodily fluids (Dr Strangelove, sorry…)
Agreed, I have always kind of wondered why we do not have more public restrooms… or honestly, why we have businesses all over town that are so insistent on non customers not using their restroom… there is one restaurant that I don’t go in to because I was walking by one time and asked to use the restroom and they refused… never mind that I had probably been in the restaurant a dozen times before…
thanks
Patrick
A bus driver thanks you for the article.
And the guy that says we should “pee in our mouth”, thanks for illustrating so wonderfully the kind of moron’s that we have to deal with in our daily lives.
And then people wonder why they get left behind at stops? Drivers can only take so many “pee in your mouth” idiots before they get mean to everyone.
There may be exceptions, but I don’t think buses will fall behind schedule that much if an operator takes a pee break. That’s what I’d do if I were behind the wheel – I’d pee when I needed to wherever there was a McDonald’s or decent toilet near a stop. Usually the passengers are understanding about that sort of thing, especially if the driver lets them know what’s going on.
Puritan attitudes to piss?
BTW-Not all schedules are written so badly that the operator has no time to relieve themselves.