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Young and old, tourists and regulars, they need the bus to get where they're going. When the price to ride goes up, how will they fare?
By ELIJAH GOSIER
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 10, 2001
The pale face and short, light-blond hair blend together around the cheeseburger. The young woman attacks her food as if she is being timed.
"I'm so nervous," she explains as the burger nearly drops from her shaking hands. "My baby's in the hospital."
"He's going to be all right," says a woman sitting across from her at the Williams Park bus stop. It is an automatic response but delivered with sincerity by a total stranger.
"He was a month early," the pale woman says, speaking at the same pace with which she devoured the burger. "They've got him on a respirator. He was 6 pounds, 3 ounces. They said he would have been nine or 10 pounds if he had gone the full nine months. I just got out myself last night." Three hospital identification bands still adorn her wrists.
"That's a good weight for a preemie," assures a voice from her left. "My baby didn't weigh much more than that, and she was full-term." The owner of the voice looks too young for that firsthand knowledge.
Then Bus 18 arrives and the conversation stops as most of bus stop J loads onto it. The nervous new mother stands aside and lets two men board ahead of her. She is proud of her figure and impatient for others to share her admiration.
"You'd never know I had a baby two days ago," she says, pulling her loose-fitting shirt tight around her middle.
If the men care, they don't show it.
"I hope they let my baby come home soon," she says as she settles into her seat, surrounded by a mostly new audience. "I just had him yesterday. He's on a respirator."
"Ohhhhh," one of two young women across the aisle moans sympathetically, taking the bait.
"He was a month early, but he weighed 6 pounds, 3 ounces. He would have weighed 10 pounds if he had gone the full nine months. . . ."
The woman empathizes and gives her reassurances. The baby's weight is a good sign, she says. It's not unusual for newborns to be on respirators.
Seven minutes later, the new mother has gone from jovial to concerned to distraught. "A machine is breathing for my baby. I want him to come home."
In that same seven minutes, Bus 18 comes to a halt at the Central Plaza terminal.
"Your baby's going to be fine," the young woman tells the pale new mother.
Then she steps off the bus and out of the life of someone whose name she didn't know, whose face she is not likely ever to see again, and whose touchingly personal story she would never be able to verify.
City buses are like that.
Like elevators, they take people whose paths normally would not cross and, for the briefest moment, jam them together close enough to hear each other's heartbeat.
For some, it is an awkward, uncomfortable moment. For others, it is a rare opportunity -- to cajole, to encourage, to advise without commitment or backlash, to share intimacy without having to decide if it's genuine.
Then the doors open. And close.
On a typical weekday, 33,000 people step in and out of those doors in Pinellas County. The Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority drove them 6.8-million miles last year but can't tell you who they are. Marketing director Janet Recca says the authority has not compiled demographic data on them. Even as the board members met last week to say the cost of riding the bus should be increased -- by 50 cents for the most popular ticket -- they didn't know who their riders are.
The increases, which Recca calls "fare adjustments," could net anywhere from $700,000 to $1.2-million in additional revenue, depending on how many riders are lost.
"Are we at Williams Park yet?"
The question is an orphan in the midst of a bus load of back-and-forth banter.
A man with a boxer's eye and an old computer is making a referral. A friend is going to fix his computer, he tells a man who inquires, upgrade it for Windows. His friend is good with computers and even has some he will sell.
The man he is talking to is not convinced and loses interest a few sentences into the monologue, but that does not slow the man with the bruised eye from advertising on his friend's behalf. He doesn't talk about the eye.
Just behind the driver, a couple whose local attraction leaflets are like tourist ID cards talk rapidly as they look anxiously from their maps to the window, trying to match where they are against where they want to go.
"Are we near Williams Park?"
This time the question breaks through the chatting. The front half of the bus becomes silent as everyone realizes the question came from the man whose face is pointing straight ahead. The dog, quietly reposed under his seat, makes it clear that the man is blind.
Driver Roger Galyean glides his bus onto Third Street from First Avenue S. "Williams Park is just around the corner," he says in a reassuring voice. Moments later, in the practiced voice of a broadcaster, he announces into the bus microphone: "Next stop is Williams Park. The blind gentleman and the people going to The Pier remain seated. I'll take you right where you need to go."
"Oh, that's nice," the woman in the tourist couple says.
Williams Park, 5 acres of monuments and disparate lives, is the downtown hub for city bus routes. A dozen or so lettered bus shelters, each with its own schedule of buses, ring the park.
Galyean deposits the man with the old computer and the almost-healed black eye along with most of his other passengers at Shelter J on First Avenue N. Then he circles the park and stops on Second Avenue N.
"Okay sir, wait here and I'll come back and take you to your bus," he tells the blind man.
He shows the tourists that their destination is straight ahead, "four blocks to get there and about the same up The Pier approach."
Then he returns to the bus, takes the blind man's arm and leads him to his next bus. The dog initially eyes the driver suspiciously. Then, apparently satisfied that it's safe to delegate his duties for a few seconds, the dog agrees to tag along, glancing intermittently at his charge to make sure he's also okay with it.
His decision is warranted. They are in good hands.
"I've been doing this 20 years, dealing with people," Galyean says. He has had chances to move out of the driver's seat and into administration but declined. "I like to be out with the people. I've dealt with people all my life, since I started jerking sodas at a drugstore when I was 17."
PSTA offers human relations training for employees. But Galyean says it can't make a good driver out of someone who's not. "You have to like the traffic and the people."
That's apparently a tougher requirement to meet now than it used to be. People have changed, he says. "They won't let a bus in. I can understand road rage.
"It's hard not to get road rage," he jokes, then leaves his bus to take a break.
"Enjoy your ride," he says over his shoulder.
Max Lee usually does. He has to. He hasn't driven for 10 years. An insurance judgment against him, he explains.
Buses are his primary transportation. He rides them for an hour and a half every day going from his home near the Gandy Bridge to his job as a chef at Pasadena Steak House near St. Pete Beach.
Since he rides the same routes at the same time every day, he usually rides with "regulars." The $2.50 he spends for the Unlimited Daily Go Card that allows him to take any bus all day is a good buy, he says, just about where it needs to be. "If you know the routes, you can go anywhere you want," he says.
He says his girlfriend is also a bus rider and they use the bus on their dates. Neither is a night owl, and the buses run late enough to get them home afterward.
Lee is 45 but looks younger. He thanks his father's Chinese genes for that. "My grandfather is 92, and he's still active."
In 10 years of riding buses, he has perfected routines to avoid boredom on the prolonged trips. A St. Petersburg Times is often under his arm, or he brings a book along. He also amuses himself by watching the world that passes by the window.
"Every penny counts," he says of the transit authority's rate increases. They call them "restructuring," but by any name, they add up in a year's time, Lee says.
Under the new fare schedule, Lee's daily fare would rise 50 cents to $3.
"It might mean that I wouldn't buy the newspaper every morning," he says, smiling.
Although PTSA couldn't say who its riders are, scanning the buses and the bus stops around the city clearly reveals that they are not wealthy.
The buses are loaded with the elderly, young and middle-aged people in the uniforms of the service industry, students, the disabled and learning-impaired -- people for whom 50 cents isn't just loose change.
They ride the buses to work, to appointments, on dates, to court, to within a few blocks of anywhere in the county.
When the rates go up, some of them may no longer ride the bus. PSTA has taken that into consideration, Recca says. That's why its projection for the increased revenue from the "fare adjustments" allows such a wide range, from $700,000 to $1.2-million.
"There is a possibility, a slight possibility, that the ridership might decrease," Recca says. "Now remember, the last time we had a fare increase was seven years ago. The possibility is there that some people will say, 'I'll just stop riding the bus, or I won't ride it as often.' But that's usually a temporary situation, then they usually return to the system."
"I have no choice," says Tameka Williams, a wisp of a woman carrying her 1-year-old son, John. "I don't have a car."
The bus sometimes makes her late for her job at Burger King, and her boss doesn't like it, but she has no choice. "Every day. Work, doctor, everywhere," she says. She has been riding the bus about eight years.
She usually buys the daily Go Card, the same one bought by Lee and 55,000 other riders each month. She was not pleased to learn that it will cost 50 cents more in August.
"Ooh, Lord. That's going to hurt my pocket."
She was thoughtful for a moment. "What about the dollar ticket? Is that going up too?"
The cost of the single trip ticket will go from a dollar to $1.25.
"Ooh, Lord," says the young mother who works at Burger King.