An unknown transit thief managed to quietly borrow an MTA bus from a Bronx street this weekend, taking it on a round-trip jaunt to Queens without anyone noticing for most of the day.

According to police, an MTA supervisor reported the missing bus to the NYPD on Monday afternoon at 3 p.m. A review of the bus's GPS tracker later revealed it had been swiped from outside The Crossings mall on Hunts Point Avenue in Longwood at 4 a.m. Sunday morning. The bandit somehow got on board the bus and drove it to Queens, then at some point before 7:40 pm Sunday returned it to Westchester and Prospect avenues in the Bronx—just a few blocks from where it was initially snagged.

There was no one aboard the bus, which the Post reports was "being used as a shelter for off-duty bus operators," and no suspects have been identified. A spokesperson for the MTA did not respond to a request for comment; a police report notes that the cross-borough trip bus trip was made "without authority or permission to do so."

According to an unnamed bus driver who spoke with the Post, the pilfering of city buses is a fairly frictionless process: "They’re push-start buses. You don’t even need a keyless fob. Anyone can just climb into a bus and push the button and drive wherever the hell they want. It’s a big problem."

Still, not everyone has what it takes to hijack a bus in this town. “You’ve got to have some balls to steal a big-ass bus and drive it all the way the fuck to Queens," the driver explained. "You have a lot of people who have a fantasy about driving a city bus, and when you leave a bus out there in the open with no one inside, you’re at risk of someone stealing it."

While arguably not a big problem—it took more than 15 hours for anyone to notice, after all—illicit bus-borrowing is certainly an issue that the MTA has previously encountered. Serial mass transit thief Darius McCollum was responsible for at least 30 such incidents, most recently pirating an unattended Greyhound bus outside the Port Authority in 2015. In October, McCollum, who is autistic, was ordered to a psychiatric facility after a judge determined he had a “dangerous mental disorder."

Other bus snatchers have gotten off much easier. Back in 1947, New York City bus driver and Bronx native William Cimillo "got tired of it all" and took an impromptu journey down to Florida in a stolen bus. He was arrested in Hollywood, but the charges were dropped after he gained folk hero status, and he was permitted to keep his job.

The investigation into Sunday's incident is ongoing, according to the NYPD.

