Riding the night bus

It's half past 11 on a Saturday night when I give the TigerTransit's on-demand service a call. Three minutes later, I see the bus stop near the U-Store, its yellow and orange lights making it look like a big-wheeled bug crawling through campus. Curious to see where the night bus will take me and the rest of its midnight wanderers, I find a seat behind 52-year-old Ken Yost, who drives the 14-seater from 11 p.m. to 3 a.m., seven days a week.

While the bus jolts and hums into motion, Yost tells me that his most frequent patrons are graduate students and Street-bound undergraduates and that his busiest days are Thursdays through Saturdays. Though the rides around campus are relatively short, there's still enough time for tensions to build, especially between grads and wasted freshmen.

"They fight and argue," Yost says. "You grow beer muscles, and it don't work, because I've had grad students tell them right off. I let the guys argue with each other. When the freshman males argue with the females on the bus, that's my time to say, ‘OK, you guys shut up.' "

Yost tries to avoid these late-night skirmishes by separating his Street pickups from those at more sober locations, like Lewis Library. Even then, it's not an easy job.

"We did have a bus driver quit because of these kids," Yost says. "They were that belligerent with him one night. He parked the bus up here and said, ‘That's it. I'm done. I'm done. I don't have to take this.' " The driver had worked three or four weeks before having a bad run-in with a group of 20 students from an athletic team. "And the next night I got them guys on the bus. I didn't quit. There's the difference - I like the challenge."

Yost isn't afraid to intervene when necessary. "Do you know why they call this TigerTransit?" he asks. "Cause they got a fat Tiger sitting up front. I'm like a cat, a big tiger: If I gotta get up, you're not going to like it. That's why we're called TigerTransit. Got nothing to do with the school mascot."

But, he points out, "it's rare to have somebody really bad on the bus." He points to his rear-view mirror, indicating the handful of students scattered in the seats behind him, their destinations somewhere between the Friend Center, E-Quad and Graduate College. "These guys, I know they're studying."

He emphasizes that most of his bus riders - regardless of their blood alcohol content - are "good kids," and he enjoys chatting with them. "A majority of the students are entertaining and interesting."

Yost has a few "regulars" - students that routinely call the night bus, especially graduate students and those working on research projects in the labs. "I remember everybody I picked up all night," he says. "I don't remember names. I remember where people got on and off."

Shortly after Yost explains to me that drinking is not allowed on the bus, we make a stop at Henry Arch, and the doors swing open to a swaying crowd of students. The first one busts in with a loud "Fuck yeah!" and the rest of the troop stumble in after him, struggling to fit in the 14-seater. At least two of the guys have drawn-on mustaches. One rider extends his hand and introduces himself to me as Mike with an overly friendly, "Nice to meet you."

The bus rolls on toward Prospect Avenue, and a slightly out-of-tune chorus of "The wheels on the bus go round and round" kicks in. As "the wipers on the bus go swish-swish-swish, swish-swish-swish," Ken and I exchange a glance in the rearview mirror.

When the bus doors swing open to let them out, someone shouts, "I'm not drunk enough. Anyone want to take shots?" and Mike shakes my hand again. The last student to leave, the designated Sober Sam of the group, turns around and says, "I apologize for my friend."

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The doors close, and Yost notes that when he picks them up again later, "they're gonna be worse."

Driving the bus nightly since the service started this past January, Yost has built up an impressive stock of anecdotes, and as he picks up a grad student dressed in a velvet suit jacket, Yost delves into his vomit procedure.

"You'd be surprised. I've had students throw up on me," he says. When this happens, Yost has to go back to the station, rinse the bus and grab another one. In one particularly vivid instance that he recounts, a group of students from Prospect Avenue got on the bus, and one of the girls proceeded to "blaaah, all over me." She had upchucked just before stepping on, and he told her to "finish what [she] started."

Receiving very little help from the girl's friends, Yost carried her off the bus and into her hall, knocking on the door until one of her roommates answered. A few days later, the girl came back to thank him and apologize.

"For the rest of the year, she was good. She never got drunk again," Yost says. "She seemed like a smart girl, just one night being dumb."

Yost's ultimate goal for his work is simple: "If I can get to the end of a night and no one's thrown up on any bus and I got 99 percent of my calls - that's my target."

Still, the night bus serves as more than a means of transportation for campus-crawling insomniacs and Street-bound drunkards. "We can call [Public] Safety or Princeton Police if we see something," Yost says. "I don't hesitate."

Last spring, Yost caught two teenagers pulling bikes off their racks during his cigarette break. From his siren-less bus, he patrols without attracting the same amount of suspicion and attention as a police car.

Student safety is his most important priority, and he always watches from the bus to make sure his riders get to their destination, "I'm getting paid by the hour. I'll sit until you get inside the building."

"That's how I look at this," Yost says. "Dad, come pick us up."