[ Sign up for our Health IQ newsletter for the latest coronavirus updates ]“We’ve been waiting a long time for this, probably going on four years,” Gary Dunn, vice-president of the Amalgamated Transit Union local.“We currently have two drivers now that have pretty much finished with their driving career as result of assaults.”Last year, the union said a serious assault in March 2019 could have been prevented if barriers had been in place.
In that incident, Kelowna bus driver Peter Lansing was knocked unconscious when a passenger assaulted him.However, the transit authority said with issues like driver sight-lines to think about, it couldn’t rush into the multi-million-dollar retrofit.“We needed to be methodical in this process,” Palmer.