On my way out of the grocery store one evening, I skimmed the headlines on the newspaper rack and saw this:

Bangor will offer free bus driver training in hopes of resuming Saturday service¹

And my mind immediately went to:

“What the hell? Was the city charging for job training earlier? What was the thinking behind that? Were they afraid that someone would pose as a job applicant, get the training, and then go to one of the few other municipal bus services in this state, none of which are in easy commute distance? No wonder they’ve had trouble hiring and retaining drivers.”

 

The actual story is stupid in a different way:

…there are no licensed instructors in the Bangor area, which led Eastern Maine Community College to stop offering a bus driver training program.

The state’s only licensed instructor is based in Waterville…

I get that “city bus driver instruction” is a bit of a specialty, and not in as much demand as, say, school bus driver instruction, but one teacher for 1.3 million people?²

I’m not sure what the best solution would be, but the first one that occurred to me was for the government to train its own employees – probably at the state level, because demand in any Maine city or town would be too low – rather than hope for someone in the private sector to be willing and able³ to do it for them.

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1. While the headlines of the BDN’s print and online editions sometimes differ, I don’t remember a difference in this case.

2. Also, Waterville? Waterville barely has a bus system. (No, check that, Waterville apparently no longer has a bus system, just ADA vans.) I guess the only person interested in this job lived there already.

3. Those are the requirements for a basic truck driving instructor; It doesn’t include whatever goes into making a specialist city bus driving instructor.

   The biggest stumbling block is probably that someone applying for an instructor license has taken a defensive driving course within the past year, which probably means shelling out hundreds to retake driver’s ed. (The state does offer a defensive-driving-only course for $70, with the closest location apparently being Newport.)