SEPTA bus driver slashed by passenger in Delaware County. Police are searching for the suspect.
Police were searching for the assailant, who had boarded the bus at 69th Street. The driver sustained non-life-threatening injuries. Attacks against transit workers have increased in recent years.
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A SEPTA bus driver sustained slash wounds to his face and abdomen Saturday afternoon when he was attacked by a passenger in Delaware County.
The 31-year-old driver of the Route 108 bus was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. He was in stable condition Saturday evening.
The attack occurred about 1 p.m. near the intersection of Church Lane and Connell Avenue in Yeadon Borough, outside Southwest Philadelphia.
The passenger, who had boarded at 69th Street, exited the bus at the Yeadon stop, then pulled out a knife or other sharp instrument and attacked the driver, who had just started working for SEPTA earlier this year, said SEPTA spokesperson Andrew Busch.
» READ MORE: SEPTA drivers are increasingly victim to abuse and assaults. Some say the agency isn’t doing enough to protect them.
It was not immediately clear what preceded the attack. SEPTA is reviewing video footage from the bus.
“We’re not sure yet what was going on with the passenger,” Busch said. “That’s under investigation.”
Busch said extra SEPTA police had been assigned to the Yeadon area to assist local police in the search for the assailant.
“Whenever we have an operator or other front-line employee who is assaulted and suffers an injury, it’s taken with the utmost urgency,” he said.
Assaults on bus drivers and other transit operators have increased dramatically in recent years across the United States and Canada. In Philadelphia, assaults on SEPTA operators nearly quadrupled from 2019 to 2020, at the onset of the pandemic, and have remained high The Inquirer reported last year.
“The system has been taken under siege” by people experiencing mental illness, homelessness, or drug addiction, Brian Pollitt, president of Transport Workers Union Local 234, which represents SEPTA transit workers, said to The Inquirer at the time.
“The job now comes with a lot more than it did when I started here,” said Pollitt, who began his career as a SEPTA bus operator 34 years ago.
Passengers spat on SEPTA operators 242 times from the beginning of 2017 through April 2022, according to the transit agency’s incident reports. In 2022, there were 53 physical assaults, up from 13 in 2018.