Ask a Muni Driver

I have to back up a bit and explain that MUNI drivers pick ‘runs’ during sign-up periods. A run is defined by which route (i.e., which bus line) you will be driving on any particular day of your work-week, and of course by the time of day that you’re driving. There is a shift differential for the hours of 7pm to 6am, but it really doesn’t amount to much. Drivers who take these shifts are often parents who want to their days free. Depending on the number of hours involved in each day’s route, runs can have huge pay differences. Runs with massive splits pay the most and senior drivers have first dibs at them. These runs typically involve doing a couple of turns on a commute bus in the morning, spending the rest of the day on standby status, and returning to driving for a couple of runs on the evening commute. These are gravy runs and there’s always a lot of MTA talk of eliminating them. There aren’t very many of these runs, though, so it’s unclear how much cash MUNI would save by getting rid of them.

Straight-through runs are popular, but difficult to do (all graveyard runs are straight-throughs, which is another reason some drivers opt for night shifts). These are the runs without any kind of break at all – no built-in downtime whatsoever for eight to nine and a half hours. That’s right; technically you aren’t supposed to even pee for all that time. You may ask why this type of run is popular, and the answer leads me to the final, most typical type of run: the ‘standard split’. These runs usually have a built-in split of around two hours, which sounds great until you realize that you still have to drive for at least eight hours, making for a guaranteed ten-hour day, and often a twelve-hour day. The other factor is that most of these runs involve switching to a different bus line during the unpaid split, so you might have to get yourself from one side of the City to the other during what looks on paper like a juicy break. A lot of MUNI drivers spend inordinate amounts of time either figuring out how to get from the barn to their car, and how to park their car at the relief point, or calling another driver and asking them to drive their car to the relief point, or sacrificing a real lunch because they suddenly discover that they don’t have time to catch the necessary busses to make it to their relief point on time, yadda yadda yadda. It’s a lot of (again, unpaid) work to get to the second half of this type of run. Many of you are going to say “but I see drivers on breaks all the time”. Actually what you’re likely seeing are layovers – the bit of time at the end of each trip before the driver is supposed to turn around and go back. This time is written into the route schedule and can be as short as 1 minute, or at most 20 minutes. Most layovers are about 8-10 minutes. This time exists so the driver can get back on schedule by NOT having a layover at all if he’s running late – so it’s not actually a break because it’s not guaranteed. If you’re not on time for any reason – bad traffic, a wheelchair passenger, whatever, you don’t get this time. People like me, who are afraid to drive a bus like a bat out of hell, rarely get any layover time on busy lines.

So that’s breaks.