In the coming months, VIA Metropolitan Transit will spend up to $2.5 million to retrofit some 500 buses with hard plastic barriers or shields to protect drivers and deter what their national union says has been a rise in assaults and deaths at the hands of passengers.

“It’s happening every day all over the country,” said John Acosta, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents some 200,000 workers in the U.S. and Canada. “Last year, one of our drivers in Tampa was murdered, had his throat slashed and bled to death. One in New Jersey was stabbed seven times.”

Such assaults are rare in San Antonio — but not unheard of. On Feb. 19, VIA driver Roland Orta was beaten and stomped on by a screaming passenger whom he had asked to leave the bus. The assailant got away, and police later made an arrest with the help of bus camera footage.

“We’ve had guys (VIA drivers) get punched in the face over paying the fare,” said Juan Amaya, president of ATU Local 694 in San Antonio. “We have about 100 routes, but only 40 transit (police) officers. I don’t want to go through what they did in Tampa.”

In Washington, D.C., in 2017, a woman got 120 days in jail for throwing a tumbler of urine at a bus driver, while in Bethlehem, Pa., a woman got enraged after a driver refused to make a stop, threw coffee at him and pulled a gun. Nationwide, the most frequent abuse of a driver involves spitting, usually over paying the fare.

Yet the ATU acknowledges that no organization keeps comprehensive national records on driver assaults, so it’s difficult to say reliably if or where the violence is increasing. Transportation researchers suggest that with surveillance cameras and smartphones more commonplace, more driver assaults are featured on crime-driven local TV news.

In San Antonio, according to VIA’s data for 2017 through 2019, the number of actual physical assaults against drivers is low. Statistics provided by Tremell Brown, its vice president for safety, training and system security, show an average of only 33 incidents per year in those three years, out of roughly a quarter of a million annual shifts by some 1,300 drivers.

That means assaults have happened on about one-hundredth of 1 percent of VIA driver shifts. Only two incidents per year involved punching or the use of a weapon, Brown said.

On ExpressNews.com: VIA driver beaten unconscious by unruly passenger

Put another way, for every 100,000 hours of service by VIA drivers, there are 1½ reported incidents of assault, most of which involve spitting, pushing or throwing of liquids, said Brown, who has been with VIA for 31 years and started off as a driver.

“Although the numbers are small, one assault is too many for us,” said Brown, echoing comments from numerous transportation professionals around the country.

Bob Comeaux, a VIA board member with almost 50 years working in local and national unions, said that while local drivers were “right to call attention to the problem, I wouldn’t want it blown out of proportion.”

“I believe the killing of the bus driver in Tampa is the impetus” for increased complaints to the VIA board from employees, Comeaux said. “I frequently ride the bus, and personally, I’ve seen no incidents against drivers. Almost everyone gets off a VIA bus and says ‘Thank you’ to the driver and is appreciative.”

Jeff Arndt, the CEO of VIA, credited San Antonio’s low number of serious assaults on drivers to the deterrent effect of having about eight surveillance cameras on every bus, uniformed and plainclothes police on some of them, plus de-escalation training that every driver can use to deal with unruly riders.

Arndt said drivers are trained not to confront passengers who refuse to pay their $1.30 fare. “It’s not worth endangering the operator or the passengers over $1.30,” he said, adding that no transit system in the country could afford to have armed police on every bus 24 hours a day.

Top hits: Get San Antonio Express-News stories sent directly to your inbox

The installation of the shields for drivers has been studied and tested by VIA for about three years and is not without its own set of controversies.

On a bright winter afternoon on San Pedro, passengers waiting for the No. 3 bus were unanimous in opposing the safety shields, believing they would impose an unnecessary barrier to the humanizing daily conversation they had with drivers.

“I’ve seen a guy spit on a driver,” said Charles Chandler, a worker from Alabama who assembled industrial scaffolding for 20 years. “But I haven’t seen enough violence to justify a shield. I think it’s a waste of taxpayer money.”

Chandler got some amused nods from fellow waiting passengers when he added that it might be the people who lash out against drivers who have the most to fear. “We love the drivers,” he said. “Anyone who tried to hurt them would be jumped by everyone else in a split second.”

The sister of Orta, the VIA driver assaulted on the No. 631 bus on the near West Side, said he believed that the shields would have been little help for him or other drivers who get out of their seats to calm or control passengers — a response to potentially violent situations that VIA officially discourages.

Some drivers advocate new technology that sends an alert to transit police when the driver leaves his seat for an extended period.

VIA first tested some shields in 2017, but it didn’t go particularly well.

“There was an overwhelming ‘no’ from the drivers,” said Brown, the VIA vice president. “Some liked it, but many said they had a feeling of claustrophobia, there was too much glare or there wasn’t enough room for their arms. We ran it for nine months. The local union test-drove some buses.”

With the second pilot program, started last month, Brown said the driver shield technology had evolved. The hard plastic compartments being marketed to VIA by four national companies had sliding panels, fans for circulation and increased room for drivers with Popeye forearms.

Brown said he and VIA managers were sympathetic to passenger concerns that the shields might ruin the personal connection they had with drivers, so the shield makers altered their designs to allow the Plexiglass windows to be folded down.

“It won’t be like a bank teller. You’ll still have communication,” he said.

Amaya, the local union president, said passengers have raised a valid issue.

“Our people love our drivers, and our drivers love our people,” Amaya said. “But there were 10 (minor) assaults just in January. We had about 30 in all of 2019. People just want to vent sometimes. I’d say 90 percent of them are about paying the fare.”

The Amalgamated Transit Union supports federal legislation introduced in 2018 that would require driver protection barriers on all buses and the separate reporting of all assaults on drivers to the Federal Transit Administration’s National Transit Database.

Currently, the NTD mixes in driver assault reports with all bus-related injuries, including those to passengers in collisions, so some agencies are reluctant to invest millions of dollars in driver safety equipment without more convincing data.

What drives Amaya to pursue all these remedies is the fear that a bus driver could be killed in San Antonio, he said, adding, “If that happens, when I go to the family, I want to be able to tell them that I did everything I could.”

bselcraig@express-news.net