It is 5:48 in the morning at the Geary and 33rd Avenue stop and Bessie Hu, 58, is opening the doors of the 38-Geary inbound for the first run of her shift.
Three people get on. The first is a man in a hospital scrubs jacket she has been picking up at this stop since 2009. He has had two heart attacks. The second is a woman who works the breakfast shift at a cafeteria on California Street; she has been getting on at this stop since 2014. The third is a teenager Bessie has not seen before. He pays in cash, gets a transfer, sits in the back.
Bessie has driven the 38-Geary for 27 years. She started in November 1998. She has, by her own count, missed 14 days of work in those 27 years, all of them for surgery on her right knee in 2017.
She is the only operator at the Presidio division who refuses to bid for an easier route. The 38-Geary is the busiest bus line west of the Mississippi. Forty thousand boardings a day. Ten miles of road from the Salesforce Transit Terminal to the cliff at 48th Avenue. Bessie says the math of the job is what she likes. “The route is the route,” she says. “What changes is who is on the bus.”
Her father, Hu Wei, drove a bus for 22 years in Hong Kong before the family came to San Francisco in 1981. Bessie learned to drive a stick shift on his Volvo when she was 14, on the hill at California and Stockton, with him in the passenger seat saying nothing.
“My father told me, you watch the people, not the road,” she says. “The road has rules. The people have stories. The bus is where the two meet.”
She knows the regulars by their breathing. She means it literally. The man in scrubs breathes hard for the first six stops because he is rushing to the V.A. on Clement. The breakfast cafeteria woman breathes evenly because she has 38 minutes before her shift and time to think. A small, gray-haired woman who gets on at Funston has emphysema and breathes in a count of three. Bessie hears her come up the steps and knows who it is without looking.
In 2003 a man got on at Park Presidio with a duffel bag and would not look at her. Bessie watched him in the rearview mirror for four stops. He sat behind a partition where the operator could not see him directly. At Masonic she pulled over, opened the doors, and walked back. The man was crying. The bag had a gun in it. Bessie called her dispatch on the radio without taking her eyes off him. The police came in five minutes. The man let them take the bag. He thanked Bessie. He got off at Van Ness with two officers. He did not get on the 38 again.
There are twenty stories like that, by Bessie’s count. She does not tell most of them. She wrote four of them down in a small spiral notebook in the glove compartment of bus 8174 in 2009 and stopped after the fourth because she did not like reading them back to herself.
Her current husband is also a MUNI driver. They met on a route swap in 2008. He drives the N-Judah. They have a rule: they do not talk about work at home. They have one daughter, eight years old, who has ridden the 38 every Saturday since she could walk. The regulars know her name.
In 2024 the 38-Geary got dedicated lanes between Fillmore and Park Presidio. Bessie says the lanes saved her four minutes per run. “Four minutes is a person,” she says. “The person standing at Anza in the rain because the previous bus was eight minutes late. We do not get four minutes back unless someone gives them to us.”
I rode the 6:14 inbound with her on a Tuesday in October. We picked up forty-two people in the first ten minutes. Bessie said hello to nine of them by name. She nodded at four others. Two she had not seen before; she watched both in her mirror until they got off.
At 6:42 the cafeteria woman, whose name is Maria, got off at Geary and Polk. Maria has been getting off at Polk for eleven years. She turned at the door and said, “Have a good one, Bessie.” Bessie said, “You too.” It was the longest exchange they had on the trip. Bessie does not need more than that to know how Maria’s morning is going.
