(eye Weekly, 2 Jun 2005)
by Liz Clayton
HWY 400 AND FINCH — Stephen Burley is excited to hear that I’ve never driven a bus before. As the reigning 2004 TTC “Bus Roadeo” champion, he’s at the TTC’s Arrow Road Facility to show novices like me the basics of not only how to drive a shiny new Orion 7 bus, but how to drive it through a series of 10 increasingly difficult cone formations—occasionally backwards. The test drive, through a course that simulates some of Toronto’s trickiest bus manoeuvres, will allow outsiders like myself to understand the rigours our bus wranglers must endure each day.
Burley, who is only a little burly, has driven large vehicles for years,
both on farms and for the military, which is a lot more experience than
I, trained mostly in sedans in the terrainless Great Lakes Region,
have. Luckily
the only terrain on this course is made up of small balls, orange cones
and big white barrels—and I’m technically not supposed to drive over
those.
Before I take the (enormous)
wheel, I and a few other members of the media and bus-curious community
are given a run-through of the Bus Roadeo’s
circuit of obstacles. Burley announces, a little too breezily, that “the
object is not to hit anything,” though in almost every instance I expect
the bus to be bigger, or at a more dramatic angle, than Burley’s expert
navigation proves it to be. “The Double Offset” looks impossible.
When he demonstrates “The National”, a challenge involving
a narrow navigation of cones and then a back-up at a steep angle, I am
certain
I am not Bus Roadeo champion material.
The course is hard, but he and the other drivers like it that way, says
Burley.
“
They’re not giving me a whole lot of room,” he says, gritting
his teeth into the rearview mirror at a line of perilously close orange cones. “But
then if they did, I wouldn’t be here. I want to challenge myself.”
When I take the driver’s seat, I focus foremost on trying not to kill
any of the “spotters” litteredabout
the course whose job it is to upright toppled and smashed cones, measure accuracy,
and so
forth.
The ride is surprisingly easy — my main complaint is a feeling
of mild dizziness from trying to watch the rearview mirrors which
vibrate nonstop,
presumably from the intensity of my driving. All in all, the controls
are actually simpler than my own car. Maybe I should get turn signals
installed
on the floor of my Volvo.
Once I’m convinced this 40-foot-long motherfucker is not going to go
wildly out of control, I relax a little bit, and soon I’m gliding through
the “The Serpentine” with ease. I have just entered a fantasy
of myself as a skilled and graceful driver, imagining easy waltzes through
complex cone formations (I wish they were all named as fancifully as “The
National” but alas, “The Marquis” or “The Palmerston” never
show up), when Burley looks at a cone in the rearview and announces, “You
kinda gobbled that one.” In the real Roadeo, I’d
have been docked 25 points, but today, I only lose prestige.
I really only feel that
I have truly failed when, in the very last challenge, Burley exhorts me
to “gun the shit out of it!” and I chicken
out of hammering down the gas pedal and abandoning myself to the 20 mph minimum
speed of the “Diminishing Clearance” challenge. Somehow I manage
to kiss the white paint of several barrels nonetheless — making
it pretty impossible to imagine getting this thing down Victoria
Park or Finch
at rush hour. Our transit workers are cowboys indeed.