Page 17 - BusinessWest June 17, 2024

“We can train just about anybody to drive a bus. But you can’t train someone to have good customer- service skills. And wanting to drive is just something you’ve got to have a passion for.”
more affordable. We go city center to city center. And parking can be extremely expensive in some areas, and hard to find.”
He added that the pandemic hit the work-commuter customer base hard, and it’s still struggling, at around 60% of pre-pandemic volume.
“You just don’t see workers commuting to work, and if they do, they’re not working Mondays and Fridays. I mean, the full-time office worker is just not rebounding. It’s better than it was, and it will eventually come back, I think, but some businesses are just going to thrive on people that work remotely.”
That said, the longer-distance service — say, Boston to New York or New York to Philadelphia — is booming, especially as gas prices have remained high and cities have gone to congestion pricing.
And gas prices do make a difference, he added. “You can instant- ly see it when gas prices go up. Our cost of operation goes up when fuel goes up — it’s our third-largest cost. But it’s outweighed by the fact that more people seek an alternative. When fuel hits $3, $4 a gallon, you can see an instant surge.”
That said, today’s buses are much more fuel-efficient, Picknelly said, and feature an anti-idling function that shuts them off when they idle at a gate or while parked for more than five minutes (but not while in traffic).
“There are situations when the idling won’t turn off — say it’s middle of winter and it’s freezing, and you want to heat up a little bit. That will override the five-minute idle shutdown,” Peter B. Pick- nelly said. “Same thing if it’s too hot — to keep the bus cool, it’ll override it.”
Other features of a modern bus include better-designed seats, video and Wi-Fi, and cameras that capture a 360-degree view of the bus for safety purposes.
As for those who drive the buses — the current fleet is about 200 vehicles — the younger Picknelly said the workforce crunch was severe a couple of years ago, but hiring has picked up considerably since. “We get a lot of applications every single day, so we’re able to be a little bit more picky when it comes to the driver force.”
His father noted that hiring is easier in some areas than in oth- ers. “We’re constantly hiring. But while Cape Cod and Boston are
Peter B. Picknelly, director of Safety & Security, is one of three fourth-generation family members so far to have chosen Peter Pan as a career.
Staff Photo
difficult locations, with our driver forces in New York and D.C., we have plenty of applications.”
Peter Pan has been receiving more applications these days from younger people, and the company has brought on employees in the process of getting their commercial driver’s license, and even reim- bursed them for it.
“It’s a very good job if you like to drive and you want to deal with
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