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Another Vancouver bus driver attacked; how can we protect them?

Another bus driver was attacked in Vancouver last week

Apparently B.C. transit authorities' efforts to curb assaults on its drivers isn't sinking in.

An awareness campaign called "Don't Touch the Operator" was launched at the end of March after a series of vicious assaults on bus drivers in Metro Vancouver.

But two weeks in, cameras recorded another one, this time involving a woman in a wheelchair.

According to CTV News, the driver had stopped to pick up passengers on the Downtown Eastside on Tuesday afternoon and was lowering the bus's ramp to allow the woman to roll on. But he changed his mind when she began acting aggressively.

“She apparently was very agitated, started hurling verbal abuse at the bus driver," transit police spokeswoman Anne Drennan told Global News. "It apparently was about another bus on that line, and its driver, but nonetheless she was very abusive.”

But as he was raising the ramp, surveillance video shows woman leaping out of her wheelchair and, still holding onto it, launching herself onto the bus, where she allegedly punched the driver in the face.

As the driver wrestled her back off the bus, the woman can be seen trying to bite his arm. She then attempts to get away, getting up and dragging her chair behind her.

The driver initially pursued he but gave up the chase after bystanders who knew the woman said she sometimes carried a knife, Drennan said.

[ Related: 3 women charged for attacking female Vancouver bus driver ]

The woman was arrested later at a SkyTrain rapid-transit station and took her to hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. She is, as they say, known to police.

Drennan noted that although the attack took place on Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside, assaults on drivers happen throughout Metro Vancouver's transit system.

Driver Charles Dixon was sucker-punched in the head in 2011, suffering a concussion and brain injury. The attacker, Del Louie, who has fetal alcohol syndrome, was given 18 months house arrest but jailed for 60 days after repeatedly breaching his conditions, The Canadian Press reported last year.

Since then, there have been several other high-profile assaults, including an attack on a female driver last month by three women while her bus was moving. In February, a driver was assaulted and robbed at a bus loop in suburban Surrey. Arrests were made in both cases.

And the Vancouver Sun noted attacks on drivers in Kelowna, B.C., including one where an operator was stabbed with a syringe and another where a man pointed a pistol at a driver, threatened to kill him and pulled the trigger three times.

Transit-driver assaults indeed are a national problem.

An Edmonton driver, Tom Bregg, was beaten and stomped into a coma by a drunken passenger in 2009, suffering injuries that left disfigured and blind in one eye. The assailant, Gary Mattson, was declared a dangerous offender in 2011, CBC News reported.

Career criminal Patrick Guitard last month was jailed for six months for drunkenly assaulting Ottawa bus driver Ian Hodge in March 2013 after Guitard missed his stop. The attack caused the bus to swerve into oncoming traffic, according to Metro News.

And last fall, a Winnipeg bus driver was viciously beaten by a young man for refusing to give him a transfer. The attack continued for two or three minutes until two men on the bus intervened, CBC News reported.

[ Related: Video of attack on bus driver underlines public transit concerns ]

Real solutions to the problem seem difficult to achieve.

Edmonton-area Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber (now an Independent) introduced a private member's bill, dubbed Bregg's Law, in 2011 to increase sentences for anyone convicted of assaulting a transit driver.

The legislation went nowhere but idea was resurrected last year by New Democrat MP John Rafferty, with support from Rathgeber, and Liberal Ralph Goodale who introduced separate private member's bills.

Rafferty's proposal would allow judges to increase the severity of charges to aggravated assault from common assault if the victim is a transit operator, the Winnipeg Free Press reported. That would raise the maximum sentence from six months to 14 years.

Goodale's bill would make the victim's occupation as a transit driver an aggravating factor in sentencing, regardless of the charge.

Goodale told the Free Press more than 2,000 transit drivers are assaulted annually, facing everything from being spit on to stabbing and sexual assault.

Winnipeg city council received a report last year recommending adding special constables to buses on trouble-prone routes. The city's bus fleet is already equipped with cameras and GPS, CBC News noted.

Systems elsewhere in the country have similar safeguards, including radios.

In the wake of Bregg's assault, Edmonton approved the installation of Plexiglass shields between drivers and passengers and the hiring of nine special officers equipped with pepper spray and handcuffs to ride on problematic routes, CBC News said.

Vancouver already has an armed transit police force, though it mostly monitors the city's SkyTrain system. But drivers are reluctant to adopt Plexiglass shields used by transit systems elsewhere.

“We have a relationship with our passengers and if you have a barrier putting a block to that, that’s not something that we typically want to do,” Nathan Woods, president of the Unifor local representing drivers, told News1130 last month. "We enjoy our job; we enjoy driving people to and from [places]."