Challenges for bus drivers

Dear editor: Every winter when we receive a large dumping of snow, the city crews have an exhausting task of removing the snow for our community’s safe travel.

As bus drivers the public’s safety, your safety, is our No. 1 concern. We are trained professionals sometimes doing a very difficult job in incredibly difficult driving situations.

If you have taken the bus recently you know that the bus stops are quite packed in with snow, making not only the driver’s job of landing the bus into the stop safely extremely difficult, but your job as the passenger more-so difficult to navigate the slippery piles of snow entering or exiting the bus.

We have requested on multitudes of occasions to have all the bus stops thoroughly (the key here being thoroughly) cleared. It is overwhelmingly noticeable that our community’s seniors and mobility-challenged passengers are avoiding transit because of the added perils of access. (Take a look at a snowpiled bus stop and envision a passenger with a walker, or wheelchair trying to get onto or off of a bus.)

If you have read the news headlines, snow removal budgets are well overspent already. It is recognized the city crews are doing the absolute best they can under their circumstances and it is greatly appreciated.

In future winters, we hope this challenge can be overcome and all our community can utilize the public transit system. In the meantime, please continue to be very cautious in our bus stops especially when boarding or offloading from a bus. Your safety is our No. 1 concern. Scott Lovell Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1722 Kelowna the international community: ‘We will not accept you as a nuclear weapons nation” said U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Before our breasts swell too fully as we inhale too deeply of these CBC vapours, it might be time to ask a few questions.

Wasn’t there another message sent by the international community, a treaty initiated by a Nobel Prize-winning organization (ICAN), and endorsed by 122 nations at the UN last July which said “We do not accept any nuclear weapons nations”?

Which Canadian ally, after leading a three-year war which destroyed North Korea and killed 20 percent of its population, has been threatening nuclear annihilation of North Korea for decades, long before a North Korean nuclear program existed?

Which country is implementing a trillion plus dollar program to “modernize” their nuclear arsenal to make their nukes more “useable”?

What if Russia repeatedly massed 300,000 troops along the Ukraine border, conducted fly-overs with stealth and nuclear weapons-capable aircraft, and announced plans for “regime change” as the U.S. continues to do in the case of Korea, what would Chrystia Freeland have to say? Mark Haley Kelowna Peace Group