When buses become de-facto homeless shelters, what can Triangle agencies do to help?

When Triangle transit agencies stopped collecting fares during the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of people began riding buses simply to get out of the cold or heat or to have a comfortable place to sit or sleep.

Some of these non-destination riders are homeless or have substance abuse or mental health problems and make other passengers uncomfortable. Drivers report dealing with more abusive or disruptive passengers than they did before buses were free, says Jimmy Price, GoTriangle’s manager of safety, security and training.

“Public transportation systems are faced with significant increases in the number of people experiencing homelessness, including people using public transit services as shelters,” Price said Thursday.

Price was speaking at a meeting of people from transit and social service agencies who came to GoTriangle’s headquarters to talk about how they might better help non-destination riders and improve the riding experience for everyone. The goal is to prevent or diffuse problems that might otherwise involve a call to police, said Seaira Green, chief program officer for Triangle Family Services, which provides support for homeless people.

“There may be some substance-induced challenges going on — mental health, mental illness. They’re in crisis. They don’t have the resources,” Green said. “They don’t know where they’re going because they have nowhere to go.”

Since the onset of the pandemic, the homeless population in the Triangle has increased by up to 22%, Green said. But while Triangle Family Services has traditionally reached out to people in camps, shelters or on the street, it hasn’t gotten involved with buses unless law enforcement officers called the agency about a disruptive rider who needed help, she said.

That needs to change, she said.

“We need to be involved at the onset versus on the back end,” she said. “We now recognize that.”

Number of ‘security incidents’ on buses has risen

Drivers could use the help, according to transit agencies. In 2019, when it still collected fares, GoTriangle had to call police 7 times because of problems on its buses or at it stations, Price said. Those numbers have risen steadily since rides became free, reaching 55 last year, he said.

The problems caused some drivers to quit, Price said.

“Some drivers started to feel like ‘OK, maybe I need to leave GoTriangle because I don’t want to have to address these concerns,’” he said. “Because they weren’t equipped to know how to deal with them.”

Price said GoTriangle drivers recently received training for conflict resolution and de-escalation techniques to help with troubled passengers.

But that’s just a start. On Thursday, people from the transit and social services agencies traded other ideas for how to deal with disruptive riders who may need help.

They included simple strategies, such as placing placards or brochures on buses with information about shelters and mental health and social service agencies. Someone suggested putting that information on bottles of water that transit agencies could hand out on hot days.

Gary Beasley of the Durham Rescue Mission suggested that drivers be able to give out maps that show which routes people can take to shelters and other places to get help. Triangle Family Services hands out such lists, with names, addresses and phone numbers, but looking it over on Thursday Green realized that it doesn’t include information about how to get to them on the bus.

“That’s a missing piece that would really be valuable for our non-destination riders,” she said. “We hand these out all the time, but it’s missing valuable information.”

Personal interaction with passengers needed as well

There was also broad support for Triangle Family Services and other agencies putting outreach workers or “ambassadors” on buses and in stations — people who are trained to recognize someone who needs help and offer it to them.

Rikki Gardner of Housing for New Hope in Durham said simply posting phone numbers won’t be enough.

“I don’t think one phone call to someone is going to do it,” Gardner said. “It’s going to be that personal interaction of someone seeing that other person and engaging in dialogue with them on the bus.”

Triangle transit agencies stopped charging fares early in the pandemic, to try to curb spread of the coronavirus by reducing interactions between riders and drivers. Emergency federal money helped the agencies make up for the lost revenue.

That money will eventually run out, forcing local governments to find alternatives, cut service or go back to collecting fares. GoTriangle is surveying its riders to see how they feel about the prospect of paying again, at gotriangle.org/faresurvey.

Meanwhile, Charles Lattuca, GoTriangle’s president and CEO, said Thursday’s meeting was just the start of an effort to better serve non-destination bus riders.

“This is not a conversation that is going to be done with today, tomorrow or even six months from now,” he said. “We’re going to have to keep working on this and show folks that we do have compassion and we do see that there is need out there and there are ways to serve that need in new ways that we haven’t done before.”