A Queens bus driver unraveled yesterday morning after a teenager boarded without paying his fare. The (NSFW) video of the encounter begins with the Q112 driver telling the boy, "The only way you're getting out is through the fucking window."
"You drive a bus! What the fuck is wrong with you?" the boy responds, adding, "If I was a grown man, you'd be doing this?"
"If you was a grown man you'd have paid your fucking fare!" the driver retorts. And it just gets worse from there.
According to the Daily News, the boy is 16-year-old Kobe Vaughn. After the driver shoved Vaughn off his bus, the teenager allegedly threw a trash can at the door, damaging it. He is charged with misdemeanor criminal mischief. The driver has not been charged.
An MTA spokesman said that the incident is under investigation. A transit source told the paper, "He's done. There's no way he's getting out of that one."
John Samuelson, the president of TWU Local 100, released this statement on the matter:
Operating a bus on the streets of New York is a stressful job under normal circumstances. It becomes unbearable when you add in an obnoxious serial fare-beater, repeatedly provoking a hard working Bus Operator, spewing racially charged taunts at him and interrupting service. This driver has 25 years of service to the working families of New York. Hes a military veteran working on Veterans Day and now hes facing termination. Something is definitely wrong with that picture. We intend to vigorously defend his livelihood.
According to the MTA bus driver we interviewed last week, farebeaters are extremely common:
When it comes to fare evasion, because weve had fatalities due to operators pursuing the fare with passengers, now what they tell us is, Dont worry about the fare. They tell us that from day one. Your first day of training, they tell you, The fare box is not yours. Dont worry about people not paying the fare. We have a special box we press on the fare box and we just press and thats it.
