Metro honors female drivers for Women’s History Month and Transit Operator Appreciation Day!

Metro Celebrates Girls’s Historical past Month and Transit Operator Appreciation Day

Transportation isn’t a person’s world any longer –– if it ever had been in any respect. Increasingly more, girls are main the cost in the case of shifting us round LA. This Girls’s Historical past Month, we’ll be sharing tales and suggestions from a number of of our superb feminine staff. Whether or not they’re bettering our stations or they’re driving your bus, these girls are liable for making your journeys protected, snug, and well timed. Subsequent up in our sequence –– and simply in time for Transit Driver Appreciation Day –– is Max Boenish, a bus operator with Division 1, which is positioned on the sting of Skid Row.

I met Max Boenish about six months in the past on the forty sixth annual Bus Roadeo. She was competing within the occasion’s grand finale in opposition to twenty Metro bus operators, most of whom had been males. For Max, Girls’s Historical past Month opens up area for deeper, extra nuanced conversations about gender, and she or he pertains to the time period genderqueer.

Rising up in a small city in Washington, public transportation wasn’t a factor for Max. After working to assist home the chronically homeless in Seattle for ten years, she determined to maneuver to Los Angeles, the place she educated as a bus operator earlier than beginning to drive for Metro. Now, driving out of Division 1, Max enjoys the communal vitality of the division and the number of bus strains she will get to function, together with her favourite, Line 53.

For the reason that final schedule shakeup, Max has been driving Line 18, interacting with common passengers who do their day by day errands and greeting them by identify. Her interactions with passengers, just like the grandmother and granddaughter who trip day by day to do their grocery purchasing, make her job rewarding. Just lately, a espresso vendor even gave her a free pastry, recognizing her because the pleasant bus driver.

Metro is proud to have fun Girls’s Historical past Month and Transit Operator Appreciation Day with devoted staff like Max Boenish, who convey pleasure and heat to their passengers every day.