The Kid Who Loved Buses Now Drives Them

Louis A. Ortiz prefers driving the 60-foot bus to “the shorty,” as he calls the 40-footer. “I love the long buses,” he said. “People find it surprising, but they’re easier to handle. The back follows you. It’s like going from a Chevy Traverse to a Hyundai Elantra. Once you drive a large truck, it’s kind of uncomfortable going to a smaller vehicle.”

“I always wanted to drive a bus when I was younger,” the 55-year-old recalled. “I was always fascinated with buses.” Growing up in the Bronx, Ortiz used to take the BX 9 to school and “the bus up and down Grand Concourse.”

A co-worker at the post office, where Ortiz had been working for 19 years, told him about the job opportunities at the MTA.

“I never drove a bus before.” Ortiz said. “I never drove anything larger than a Hyundai Sonata, a mid-sized minivan. I didn’t even have my CDL (Commercial Driver’s License). The MTA afforded me to train for 7 days to get my CDL, they afforded me to drive machinery like this, to have a career in driving buses.”

At first he was intimidated. He thought to himself, “Wow, I’m really driving that?’ And there’s a self-satisfaction that I can handle the 60-footer, and that driving it is more comfortable than driving a 40-footer,” he said.

Ortiz is also a qualified shifter; he can take the buses up and down the winding, narrow ramp at the bus depot and bring them to the roof, where they are parked, cleaned and filled with gasoline.

His current route is the cross-town bus on 23rd Street, but he has driven 19 other lines in the course of his 12-and-a-half-year-long career, not including the shuttle buses that often replace the subways.

“He’s a good operator,” said Lamont Forbes, a colleague at the MTA. “He’s a really good guy; he shows up to work on time, he’s very courteous to the public, and he’s a good coworker.”

“We’re like family here.” Ortiz said about his co-workers. “I wouldn’t be where I’m at today without them.”

He also loves to interact with bus riders. One time, Ortiz remembered, he was having “a rough couple of days,” when a woman came on the bus and gave him a prayer card. “These are regular customers that I know, and that day I was kind of in a gloomy mood, and she noticed it, and that meant a lot to me.”

Wilfredo Baez, the assistant general manager at the Michael J. Quill depot, said “All of our operators take pride in the work they do every day. I tend to tell my employees that not only are they New York City’s finest, but they’re also New York City’s bravest, boldest, all wrapped up into one.”

“Mr. Ortiz is one of our most outstanding operators.”