Transit strike
Letter to the Editor of the Montreal Gazette.
The strike of MTC maintenance workers is a terrible hardship for many people, but is it really necessary to limit service to a few hours daily and none on weekends? After all, it isn’t the bus drivers who are striking; it’s the people who service the buses and metro. Surely management personnel can fuel up and check the oil levels on buses during a strike; having unwashed buses on the road may be unpleasant but beats having no buses; oil changes and other periodic maintenance requirements would apply to only a percentage of the buses at any given time; major breakdowns should be relatively rare (unless there’s vandalism or the maintenance workers have not been doing a good job prior to the strike).
I see no reason why the transit authority can’t provide levels close to full service for at least the first few days of a strike. As maintenance work accumulates, some buses will be forced out of service, but this should affect only the frequency of service, not the overall hours of operation.
Is there something going on that we haven’t been told about?