No One Immune to Cost of Yellow Bus Strike

The yellow school bus strike not only hampers the students going to and from school, it inconveniences their parents, and leaves the union bus drivers and matrons without income or sick leave. Moreover it appears to require a police presence at the local yellow bus depot.

An NYPD officer from the 72nd precinct was parked in front of the Fortuna Bus Company depot at 1329 36th Street early Friday afternoon, and the day before an officer on loan (he wouldn’t say from where) sat in his patrol car around 2:30-3pm. Neither officer had seen any picketers or knew of any incidents at the depot.

Around 1pm on a rainy Friday afternoon the officer was watching four buses parked in the Fortuna lot. In a phone call to Fortuna’s offices, a man said the company’s drivers were non-union, drove all year, and handled Special Ed students.

At the Tiferes Mordechai school at 640 McDonald (just below Avenue C) on Thursday around 3pm, there were nine buses lined up. Two left stuffed with kids. Other yellow buses, including several from a local Kensington bus company, North Star Tours, stood waiting for their riders. The North Star driver said he was not union.

Elsewhere Thursday more buses were scurrying about near Dahill Road at 37th, 38th, and 39th Streets, on McDonald, and other cross streets further south walking toward Avenue I.

According to Marge Feinberg, the spokeswoman for the NYC Department of Education, yellow school buses serve 152,000 students citywide, including nonpublic school students, under DOE contracts with individual bus companies. In an email she said 46,392 pre-k and school-age students arrived at their schools Thursday,  February 7, via 3,042 yellow bus routes. That’s almost 40% of the approximately 7,700 yellow bus routes operating when there isn’t a strike.

The last school bus strike was 34 years ago, in 1979. It lasted 12 weeks, but at the time many other workers were striking too.

Image via Google Maps