The city of Detroit’s Department of Transportation, which runs 500 buses, budgeted a whopping $16.1 million this year to cover lawsuits and injury claims arising from its operations (yes, that amounts to $32,000 per bus per year). The city is finding it unusually difficult to reduce those numbers:
Matt Allen, spokesman for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, explained that Detroit is self-insured, which means money is set aside annually in an account earmarked for settlements, damages and other mishaps involving city-owned vehicles and drivers.
Meanwhile, the city, particularly the Detroit Department of Transportation, is struggling with union rules and arbitration cases that make it difficult to terminate even the most accident-prone drivers.
In one case, a bus driver was involved in 30 mishaps, hit a bicyclist resulting in a $1.4 million lawsuit settlement and, in a separate incident, had her driver’s license suspended. The city tried to fire her, according to records, but an arbitrator ruled she had to be rehired.
(David Josar, “Workers’ crashes cost Detroit”, Detroit News, Jun. 11).
4 Comments
Why not hold the union responsible to share the damages when one of their members causes the city to pay out on a suit. Especially after x number of problems/citations.
This annual total is slightly more than the MBTA (Boston) would pay each year for bus, subway and commuter rail claims combined.
(The total doesn’t include the attorneys fees paid to outside counsel for defense.)
I sympathize with the difficulty in firing accident-prone drivers, but the same liberal/redistributionist values that drive that also drive the excessive suits against the bus system. You can’t fire the drivers because, well, they’re entitled to a job and saying they aren’t cut out for it amounts to “discrimination.” And you have to allow even the dubious injury suits against the bus system because, well, the plaintiffs are sympathy-deserving “working” or otherwise poor folks who could use a little financial help anyway, so what’s the harm?
Bottom line is that the whole thing turns into an ersatz welfare supplementation system, all of which gets a wink and a nod from Detroit’s powers-that-be. Wouldn’t it be more honest to stop pretending that the bus drivers are competent and that passengers are injured, and just start handing out cash to anyone appropriately aggrieved?
The post seemingly and, in my view, correctly points out that at least some of the claims asserted against Detroit for bus-related injuries are well-founded. I’m sure many asserted claims are tenuous if not completely bogus, but some, maybe even many, are valid. But once again, unions are inflating the cost of doing business. That is to say, unions are hurting people. Of course, Detroit agreed to the CBA terms limiting discipline of poor drivers. A sad state of affairs!