Advocate: T bus drivers are rude

The MBTA has been on a public campaign to educate transit riders on good manners, but an advocacy group says the T should start with its own bus drivers.

The T Riders Union said yesterday that 645 out of 1,000 riders the group surveyed said that bus service is bad and that drivers are rude.

"The bus driver is swearing at somebody at least once a day," the group's chairwoman, Michelle McGruder, told the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority board at yesterday's meeting.

To underscore her point, McGruder told a story of a disabled woman who asked a driver to lower the bus ramp so she could get on: The driver refused. The woman stumbled onto the bus. The driver refused to lower the ramp when she arrived at her station. She fell flat on her face, and he drove away, without stopping to help her, McGruder said.

"Is there any way we can find out who the driver is on that one, who put us in a terrible liability position?" asked Baron H. Martin, an MBTA board member and a retired judge.

General Manager Daniel A. Grabauskas asked McGruder to find out more about the incident, and others like it.

"We will follow it up and take it very seriously," he said.

McGruder said the woman involved in the incident could not attend yesterday's meeting., She also said her group is planning a boycott for next year to protest the poor service.

Reached after the meeting, Steve MacDougall, who heads the Carmen's Union, Local 589, pointed out that the survey is unscientific and said bus drivers "have the toughest job in all the public sector."

"The truth, in my opinion, is that bus drivers are not rude, are not mean."

The T yesterday also announced that Paul MacMillan, acting police chief, has been named permanent chief.

Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com.