This Seattle bus driver decided to be extra nice to his passengers. Here's how it went Nov 29, 2018 at 10:29 am

Nathan Vass, 33, has driven a bus for King County Metro Transit, mostly in Seattle, for 12 years. This essay is adapted from an interview in May 2018 with KUOW’s Ross Reynolds.

I was raised on the idea that if you're nice to other people, they'll be nice to you in return. I wanted to know how far you can push that: Is it always true? Mostly true? A falsehood? I was driving this bus route where the very first stop was outside this methadone clinic on Airport Way in south Seattle. This was a segment of the population I hadn’t spent a lot of time with, and I decided, okay, let’s just see what happens here.

They were by far the most responsive, appreciative-of-kindness passengers of that whole route. I like driving the 7 and the 49 buses because those routes focus on Broadway and Rainier Avenue — neither of which have the Seattle Freeze, by and large. Very lively, high energy group of folks out there. If I'm driving in Leschi or upper Queen Anne, the folks there aren't quite as prone to interact with each other or with me. They’re a little more withdrawn. I used to drive the route through Microsoft campus to transport those passengers back into Seattle where they live, and the crowd was disproportionately extremely withdrawn. It was three months of driving that before I finally start to break these guys in, but by the end of that period, they were all saying thank you. There's a study that says unsafe neighborhoods generally have the strongest sense of community because people have to rely on each other to be safe and to survive. When I'm driving through working class and low-income neighborhoods, I notice a lot more people talking on the bus. If I say hi to people on the 7, they will say something in response. I don't drive that route because it's more cool, or more dangerous, or something like that, but because the people are more friendly. If I'm going to spend eight hours in one neighborhood, I want it to be somewhere where there's a lot of back and forth.