Sponge for Brains

Little wonder that so many people living in the nation's capital are rather more than a trifle annoyed with the public performance of so many drivers for OC Transpo, the City of Ottawa's public transportation authority. Driver incivility is a prime topic of outrage in the letters page of the daily newspaper.

Which is not to say that some drivers do not behave in a professional and exemplary manner, striving to serve the public. It's just that some, whose behaviour is truly outrageously bad, deserve the ire of the public. As though there haven't been enough complaints registered of buses failing to stop for people waiting at stops because they deem their conveyance sufficiently full of passengers.

Or bus drivers, although witnessing the sight of someone desperately trying to outrun traffic or a traffic light to make their presence at a bus stop in time, won't spend an additional heartbeat to await the arrival of the out-of-breath passenger, and instead speed heedlessly by. There are rude bus drivers who don't feel they have an obligation to respond to passenger queries.

And then there are drivers like the one who abused a single mother waiting with her two-year-old little girl and seven-month-old infant, wanting to board a bus to take them home, after an afternoon of shopping. The mother had taught her two-year-old to scramble aboard the bus, so she could then turn her attention to lifting her infant in her stroller, onto the bus.

This the little girl did, when the bus opened its doors. There was ample seating in the half-full bus and the child seated herself, waiting for her mother to clamber aboard with her little sister in the stroller. As luck would have it, another young mother with a child in a stroller awaited boarding. The bus driver informed the two mothers that he would permit only one to come aboard.

The mother of the two-year-old already on the bus insisted there was no reason they both couldn't board. She knew of no company policy limiting the number of strollers on a bus, and she could see the bus was fairly empty. The bus driver repeated his assertion; only one of the mothers with strollers would be permitted to board the bus. "He was saying fight for the spot, essentially", said the child's mother.

She repeated to the driver that both should be allowed to get on the bus. He was unresponsive and she said she wanted to speak with his supervisor. The driver refused, whereupon the passengers already on the bus began to argue with the driver that he should allow both women to board. The young girl's mother stated "No, you can't refuse us", and the driver insisted again only one would board.

Then, just as the mother began lifting her infant's stroller up to the steps, the driver said no, and closed the doors, then drove the bus away - with the two-year-old child seated on the bus, alone, without her mother. The woman disbelievingly saw her little girl begin to wail, watching her mother appear further and further away as the bus sped on, and she grabbed the stroller and attempted to catch up with the bus.

"I look at the bus and I see her head and she's going away from me and I'm thinking 'Oh my God'", the mother explained later. "I was running with the stroller and I was thinking, Oh my God please don't let the stroller flip and I'm thinking is he seriously taking her away from me?" The bus passengers began to shout at the driver, and he pulled over 100 metres down the road.

The bus driver ignored the distraught child, and a male passenger assisted her in joining her mother. And then, later, the news media were informed, and the unfortunate event became a front-page story. And OC Transpo officials confirmed that although its drivers have certain discretionary choices they may make, it does not include abducting a child.

Nor does it include excluding a mother with a child in a stroller from entering a bus as a paying passenger. Nor does it include abusive behaviour from an obviously pompous little uniformed dictator ticked off with the way his day unfolded.