Two weeks ago, Mountain Line announced it was limiting some of its routes due to a driver shortage.
The transit authority that buses people around Morgantown and the region said then it was at least 12 drivers down – and that routes might even have to be temporarily eliminated, if alternate ones were available.
After that call went out, people kept getting on the job bus, as it were.
On Friday, the transit authority announced that eight new hires are starting next week.
“And we have calls out to 61 applicants,” said Maria Smith, the authority’s assistant manager of administration and marketing. “Those numbers are a little more positive for us.”
Another positive, she said, is that applicants don’t necessarily need to have a commercial driver’s license before they get hired, Smith said.
“We can work with you on your CDL,” she said.
The authority has also ordered six smaller, light-duty vehicles that don’t require a CDL to get behind the wheel, the assistant manager added.
For more details on the hiring process, visit www.busride.org/employment.
Mountain Line isn’t the only large-scale mover of people in Morgantown and Monongalia County.
Mon County school buses run 110 routes a day, said Tony Harris, who directs transportation services for the district.
That’s not including those extracurricular runs for football games and the like, he said.
For Harris, it’s a matter of “Yeah, but,” he said.
True, the district isn’t technically down drivers, the director said. It’s just that there are no drivers to spare.
Besides its compliment of full-time drivers, the department also has 10 substitutes on call, Harris said.
“On call,” though, he said, is a slight misnomer.
“They’re out on the road every day,” he said.
And, like his counterparts at Mountain Line, he’s on a marketing run every day.
A recent recruiting fair at University High School ended up being pretty popular.
There, anyone interested got a turn behind the wheel, piloting a bus through the school parking lot.
Harris wants have another one at another school this fall, then another in the spring.
“We’ll get the cold weather out of the way,” he said.
Being a driver for a public transportation service is hardly easy, both he and Smith said.
There’s a matter of weather – Harris spent 20 years behind the wheel of a school bus in Preston County before moving over to Mon, so he knows all about that.
Drivers sometimes have something they would rather do, Harris said.
The opening day of deer season used to mean a morning of buses with empty drivers’ side seats.
At the height of the Marcellus shale boon, drivers with CDLs were enticed to steering trucks on drilling crews.
There’s also the burn-out factor, which means a safety factor, Mountain Line stressed in its call for drivers last month.
According to the Federal Motor Safety Carrier Association, the national watchdog agency for the drivers who haul people and products, a driver should be limited to no more than 10 hours behind the wheel in a 24-hour period.
At the time Mountain Line put the call out last month, its drivers were in the passing lane of that schedule, on top of working five and six days a week rather than their normal four, it said in that release.
TWEET @DominionPostWV
