University Transit System looking to add more to its 'family'

Mike Zoghby liked working at Starbucks, but the mandatory hours were too much for the second-year student to handle this school year.

Zoghby needed something flexible. A job where he could make friends, have a few laughs and occasionally break away from the University of Virginia’s architecture school that’s devouring a lot of his time.

So, now, after a couple of weeks in training, the 20-year-old is working for the University Transit Service as one of roughly 130 students who shuttle around a fleet of buses that in some cases are as old as he is.

Zoghby is in a good position to work as much as he wants for $8.50 an hour as UTS continues its perpetual push to recruit more drivers.

And at the same time he’s getting his commercial driver’s license and stepping into a UTS subculture 36 years in the making.

Fun drive

For all intents and purposes Kendall Howell is still that same bus driver who took his first route while a student at UVa. But today he’s the UTS administrative manager.

“Diesel is in my blood,” Howell said one recent afternoon as he, drivers and dispatchers gathered in the UTS dispatching hub to figure out who would cover what routes.

Howell described keeping all the routes running as sometimes akin to a “shell game.” Despite that, drivers keep the biodiesel buses moving from 6 a.m. to midnight on weekdays and from noon to 3 a.m. on weekends.

The routes are handled by students who are almost “obsessive” about keeping the operation running smoothly, Howell said.

UTS started as a pilot program in 1972 that was covered by four rented buses and 15 student drivers. Today it has 32 buses and roughly 140 employees — student drivers and full-time drivers — that serve 3 million passengers per year.

On his last day of training, several days before his scheduled commercial driver’s license test, Zoghby was out running routes with Andy Jurgens, a bus driver who graduated from UVa in May and has continued to work for UTS.

Jurgens said the UTS job and culture was a good fit for him when he transferred to the university.

“They had sort of a reputation that you meet people and hang out,” Jurgens said. “Most of my friends are bus drivers.”

Not to mention his girlfriend (the two were recently engaged), whom he met during driver training in 2006. Jurgens said he’s continuing to drive buses while his fiancé finishes school.

Family night

“Family” is how many drivers describe UTS. That can be close-to-literal, as for Jurgens and Howell, who also met his wife at UTS. Or it can just refer to the kind and quantity of time drivers spend together.

Jim Stark is a UTS dispatcher, but he also lives and hangs out with bus drivers.

In the week before UVa’s Thanksgiving break, Stark was one of 15 people, many with UTS patches on their coats, who showed up at UTS operations manager Allison Grant’s apartment for what has become a weekly ritual of watching ”It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

Anyone who dared to talk during the “Philadelphia” season finale got a “Shshhhh!” from Grant. It’s the kind of sound a person absorbed by a TV soap opera in a noisy break room might make.

For the 30 minutes the show was on, the only acceptable form of communication outside commercial breaks was laughter — which there was plenty of, along with the 12-ounce Pabst Blue Ribbons, baked chicken and Sarah Lee apple pies.

Once the episode ended, the group opted to skip a show called “Testees” that came on afterward. Instead they voted to watch previous seasons of ”Philadelphia,” which Grant has on DVD.

It was at this point when the room dissolved into multiple side conversations (some about bus driving) that were impossible to follow all at once, and which involved playful disputes — like the ones that erupt around holiday dinner tables — about who remembers what story the best.

One seemed to involve a story about Stark.

“Which version of the story are you going to tell,” Stark asked Grant mockingly. “The one you normally tell, or the real version?”

Family tree

The idea of “family” has also worked its way into UTS lingo. Those who train drivers become elder statesmen and stateswomen with trainees who are ”children” who sometimes go on to train ”grandchildren.”

It’s the kind of culture that drew former UVa student and bus driver Bill Metzger, a patriarch, back to the job after several years away from Charlottesville.

“I had the experience of leaving and coming back,” Metzger said. “The society of UTS hasn’t changed ... which is good to see.”

Some who’ve driven for several years say it can be hard to turn off work.

“Eventually you feel like you can drive a bus better than a car,” said Allie Delano, who is in her third year driving buses.

Some drivers talk about feeling compelled to pull over for people at bus stops even when they’re driving their personal vehicles.

“Whenever you go anywhere, you take ‘route’ to get there,” Grant adds.

It’s a also a job where the multi-generation culture has inspired a thesis paper and spawned events like a night where students completing their two-week driver training have come together and watched the 1994 blockbuster action movie “Speed,” centered around ... wait for it ... a rogue bus.