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Transit and intercity bus drivers

Official title Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity (SOC 53-3052)

Also called Transit bus driver, Intercity bus driver, Bus operator, Coach driver, Fixed-route bus operator

In brief

In May 2025, BLS counted 159,240 US transit and intercity bus drivers, with median pay of $59,050 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 184,990, in May 2023. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 135,000 from 1920, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for transit and intercity bus drivers: AV transit pilots, 2017 to 2025. Zero measurable employment displacement through 2025.

What the sources say

Official outlook

BLS projects employment to grow 4.1% from 2025 to 2035.

BLS Employment Projections 2025-35

AI exposure studies

  • 16.7% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
  • 0.67 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013

Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend.

Last updated .

Cite this page
APA

Future History. (2026, October 11). Transit and intercity bus drivers: jobs and pay since 1920 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3052

Chicago

Future History. "Transit and intercity bus drivers: jobs and pay since 1920." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3052.

BibTeX

@misc{futurehistory_53_3052, author = {{Future History}}, title = {Transit and intercity bus drivers: jobs and pay since 1920}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/53-3052}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }

The access date is today's date on your device.

drag to travel through time
1850187519001925195019752000now
2026
Known then as Omnibus driver (horse-drawn)
Known then as Street railway motorman / horse-car driver
Known then as Motorman (electric streetcar) / jitney driver
Known then as Bus driver / motorcoach operator
Known then as Transit bus operator / intercity motor coach driver
Known then as Bus Driver, Transit and Intercity (BLS SOC 53-3052)
Known today as Bus Driver, Transit and Intercity (BLS SOC 53-3052)
Projected to still be called Bus Driver, Transit and Intercity (BLS SOC 53-3052)
Data from the May 2025 survey
US Employment
159K
Est.

Stated in source: BLS OEWS

Official statistic
Report an error
Median Annual Wage
$59,050
Est.

≈ $57,536 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)

Official statistic
Report an error
Beat · 1892

On September 15, 1892, streetcar workers from across the US and Canada gathered in Indianapolis and founded the Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees of America: the organization that became today's Amalgamated Transit Union. The founding came at Samuel Gompers' initiative, uniting local associations that had formed in the wake of 1880s labor violence on urban streetcar lines. Their first demands: an eight-hour day, wage floors, and an end to split shifts. The 1900 St. Louis streetcar strike and 1910 Philadelphia general strike (100,000 participants) demonstrated the union's willingness to shut down entire cities. The ATU's jurisdiction (first over streetcar motormen, then bus drivers, now covering all transit workers) makes it the institutional backbone of the bus driver occupation in a way that trucking's Teamsters never achieved in transit.

Beat · 1945

American urban transit reaches its all-time ridership peak in 1945-1946, driven by WWII gasoline and tire rationing. The Federal Transit Administration estimates approximately 23.4 billion transit trips were taken in 1945: a figure that would not be approached again until the late 2010s. For the bus and streetcar drivers of that era, the work was relentless: packed vehicles, wartime labor shortages, and the peculiar social dynamics of a wartime city where women entered the transit workforce as operators for the first time. The end of the war brought demobilization, the GI Bill, suburban mortgage subsidies, and the Interstate Highway System, and the beginning of a thirty-year ridership decline.

Beat · 1964

President Johnson signs the Urban Mass Transportation Act on July 9, 1964: the first major federal commitment to public transit. The act's Section 13(c) is the consequential labor provision: no federal transit funds may flow to an agency unless that agency first protects workers under collective bargaining agreements at equivalent or better terms to those they previously had. Section 13(c) has been embedded in every subsequent federal transit authorization. It makes the transit bus driver one of the most comprehensively unionized large occupations in the US labor market, with compensation and conditions negotiated by the ATU rather than set by market dynamics.

Beat · 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act is signed on July 26, 1990. Title II mandates that all new fixed-route transit buses be wheelchair accessible, and that transit agencies provide complementary paratransit service for riders who cannot use fixed-route service. For bus drivers, ADA compliance means a new layer of training and daily responsibility: securing wheelchair tie-downs, operating kneeling bus mechanisms, communicating with passengers across a wide range of disabilities, and managing accessible-stop protocols. The ADA also created the paratransit category of transit driving: a specialized demand-response service with distinct skills, higher per-trip driver intensity, and its own labor market dynamics.

Beat · 2017

Local Motors deploys its Olli autonomous shuttle at Lake Nona, a master-planned community near Orlando, FL: one of the earliest geofenced AV transit pilots in the US. Olli is a twelve-passenger electric minibus manufactured using 3D-printed body panels, with IBM Watson powering its natural-language passenger interaction. Local Motors also deploys Olli in Washington DC and other cities. The program attracts significant press coverage for its futuristic design and AI-integration angle. In January 2022, Local Motors files for bankruptcy and retires all Olli deployments: the first prominent failure in the AV transit pilot wave.

Beat · 2020

March 2020: COVID-19 arrives. Transit ridership drops 70-80% across major US systems within weeks: the sharpest collapse since the data has been tracked. Agencies immediately cut service; many drivers are furloughed. Federal CARES Act transit emergency funding ($25 billion) and subsequent relief packages keep agencies solvent. By spring 2021, ridership slowly recovers but never fully closes the gap: by 2024 most systems report 75-85% of 2019 levels, while operator headcounts remain below pre-COVID peaks. APTA estimates 30,000+ unfilled bus driver positions nationally in 2023-2024: the paradox of a shortage inside a disruption narrative.

Beat · 2023

May Mobility launches what it describes as the first driverless public transit service in the US at Sun City, Arizona, in December 2023: a senior-focused retirement community. The service uses Toyota Sienna minivans with May Mobility's Multi-Policy Decision Making autonomy stack, with no safety driver in the vehicle. The route is low-speed, geofenced, and serves a population with limited alternative transportation. It is the most operationally mature AV transit deployment in the US as of 2025. It is also the most favorable possible conditions for AV transit: flat terrain, low traffic density, a forgiving speed envelope, a captive ridership with high need and low alternatives, and no fare payment complexity. Scaling these conditions to a full urban transit network remains an unsolved engineering and regulatory problem.

How to read this number

OEWS is a point-in-time survey snapshot, not a continuous time series; BLS advises against using it for year-over-year trend comparison.

Each dot is a cited figure over time; the dotted line only links them (values between aren't measured). Hollow dots are estimates.

Official statistic: Copied by a script from a statistics agency table or a published study's table, not retyped by hand. BLS figures and the forecast and exposure tables are also re-checked against that table on every data run. Researched context: Researched from the cited source rather than copied from it by a script, so it is not machine-checked yet. Spot a mistake? Each figure has a “Report an error” link.

Cited forecasts · present → 2035

Will AI replace transit and intercity bus drivers? What the research says

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.

Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.

What published forecasts say
Forecast change in the number of people doing this work, as published by each named source. Bars share one scale on every role, centred on zero and reaching the end at ±30%. Grey marks a small change, 3% or less either way.
BLS Employment Projections 2025-35
→ 2035
+4.1%
BLS National Employment Matrix, 2025-35 cycle, line for SOC 53-3052 (Bus drivers, transit and intercity): 166.4 thousand jobs in 2025, projected 173.3 thousand in 2035, a change of +6.9 thousand (+4.1%). Matrix employment counts all jobs in the occupation, including self-employed workers (1.7% of this occupation in 2025). The average for all occupations in this cycle is +3.5%.
Official statisticReport an error
How exposed is this work to AI (research measures)
Scores as published by each study. Each row says what it measures. These measure what AI could technically do, not forecasts of jobs lost.
Frey & Osborne (2013), "The Future of Employment"
2013 study · Probability of computerisation (2013 model)
67%
probability
What this measures

Published appendix value for SOC 2010 53-3021 Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity: probability of computerisation 0.67, rank 372 of 702 (rank 1 is least computerisable), mapped one-to-one to SOC 2018 53-3052 by the BLS 2010-to-2018 crosswalk. Frey and Osborne estimated in 2013, with a Gaussian-process classifier on O*NET variables, how likely the whole occupation is to be technically automatable over "some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two". It is a probability for the occupation, not a share of tasks and not a forecast of jobs lost.

Official statisticReport an error
Eloundou et al. (2023), "GPTs are GPTs"
2023 study · Share of tasks exposed to LLMs (β, human-rated)
16.7%
of tasks
What this measures

Published occupation-level exposure from the paper's occ_level.csv for O*NET-SOC 53-3052.00 Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity. Shown: human-rated β = 0.167, the share of the occupation's tasks an LLM could do in at least half the time at equal quality, counting tasks that need LLM-powered software at half weight (β = E1 + 0.5 × E2). Other published measures for this occupation: human-rated α (LLM alone) 0 and γ (all LLM-assisted) 0.333; GPT-4-rated β 0.241. This measures how much of the work an LLM could touch, not how many jobs disappear.

Official statisticReport an error
Today, in this role

What's changing day to day for transit and intercity bus drivers

Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.

AI is sitting alongside you hereCollect fares, validate contactless payments, and operate automated farebox systems

Collect fares, validate contactless payments, and operate automated farebox systems; reconcile receipts and complete end-of-run financial logs.[1],[7]

Where your edge is

Grow fluency with contactless and mobile payment validation; as agencies shift to all-door boarding and fare-free systems, reposition the fare-collection skill toward customer service and exception handling.

AI is sitting alongside you hereOperate real-time passenger information systems that announce stops and display connections, coordinating with agency CAD/AVL to keep announcements accurate during delays or reroutes.

Operate real-time passenger information systems that announce stops and display connections, coordinating with agency CAD/AVL to keep announcements accurate during delays or reroutes.[1],[8]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Treat automated stop announcements as a baseline and supplement with verbal communication when disruptions or unusual conditions require context that the system cannot convey.

AI is sitting alongside you hereReport service delays, incidents, and mechanical defects to dispatch via two-way CAD/AVL communication, using agency apps to log events with GPS-stamped timestamps.

Report service delays, incidents, and mechanical defects to dispatch via two-way CAD/AVL communication, using agency apps to log events with GPS-stamped timestamps.[1],[9]

Tools picking this up
Where your edge is

Practice structured incident reporting within CAD/AVL apps; good narrative documentation at the time of an event directly supports safety investigations and insurance claims.

Where transit and intercity bus drivers go next

Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.

What each move takes

Experienced transit drivers know agency CAD/AVL systems, service disruption protocols, and the geography of their network intimately. Transit dispatchers draw on exactly this operational knowledge to manage day-of service. Many agencies promote drivers into dispatch roles and provide on-the-job CAD training.

What you'd add
  • · CAD/AVL software operation (Swiftly, Avail, GMV)
  • · Multi-vehicle coordination and gap management
  • · FCC radio certification (if required by agency)
  • · Incident documentation and service-change communication
What it takesMost of your skills carry over
Tools of the era

How has the work of transit and intercity bus drivers changed since 1828?

The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.

  • Horse-drawn omnibus: fixed-fare public transit invented

    Abraham Brower's 1827-1828 Broadway omnibus established the template: a vehicle running on a fixed route for a flat fare, stopping at raised hands rather than scheduled stations. The innovation was not mechanical but institutional: the idea that urban transit could be a public service rather than a private hire. By the 1850s, horse-drawn streetcars on iron rails had improved on the omnibus's speed and smoothness, and city after city built horse-car networks that would employ thousands of drivers and grooms. The driver's job in this era was exhausting, outdoor, and seasonal: horses broke down, passengers were unruly, and schedules were suggestions.

    Effect on the work

    Created the occupation from scratch. Horse-car driving was one of the first genuinely urban mass-employment jobs in American history.

  • Electric streetcar: the motorman replaces the horseman

    Frank Sprague's 1888 Richmond, Virginia installation proved that overhead electric power could drive a street railway at commercial speed. Within a decade, cities across the country were electrifying their horse-car lines. The worker behind the controls became a "motorman": a more skilled, more respected title than omnibus driver, because the vehicle was a machine. The Amalgamated Association of Street Railway Employees (founded 1892, today's ATU) organized them. At their peak in the 1910s-1920s, US streetcar systems operated tens of thousands of miles of track; motormen were a major component of urban blue-collar labor. The job was still physical and exposed to weather on open front platforms, but unionization secured enclosed vestibules by 1899 and steady middle-class wages through the Progressive era.

    Effect on the work

    Increased transit operator employment significantly versus the horse-car era; electrification enabled higher-frequency service on longer routes, requiring more operators per line.

  • Motor bus (GMC Yellow Coach, diesel engine): streetcar replacement

    Yellow Coach Manufacturing Company, founded in Chicago in 1923 by John D. Hertz and acquired by General Motors in 1925, industrialized bus production at scale. GM's relationship with National City Lines (in which GM, Standard Oil, Firestone, and Mack Trucks collectively held investment) resulted in the conversion of dozens of American streetcar systems to bus routes across the 1930s-1950s. A 1949 federal antitrust jury convicted GM and co-defendants of conspiring to monopolize bus supply sales to NCL (the transit-conspiracy charge was acquitted). Whether conspiracy or economics, the outcome was the same: the motorman became a bus driver. The skill set shifted from managing a fixed rail vehicle to navigating mixed-traffic streets, processing fares, and managing passengers on a moving vehicle.

    Effect on the work

    Net employment roughly flat during the transition; buses carried fewer passengers per trip than full-size streetcars, requiring comparable driver headcounts on converted lines. The qualitative change: bus driving requires more continuous decision-making than streetcar operation.

  • UMTA federal transit funding + ATU labor standards

    The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 created the federal partnership in public transit, authorizing $375 million in matching funds and establishing what is now the Federal Transit Administration. The critical clause was Section 13(c): no federal transit funds could flow to a transit agency unless workers were protected under collective bargaining agreements. This locked ATU (Amalgamated Transit Union) into a federally-enforced role as the standard-setter for bus driver wages, hours, and working conditions across every federally-funded system. The result: unionized transit bus driving remained a stable middle-class job through the post-streetcar decades, even as private-sector transit had largely collapsed.

    Effect on the work

    Federal funding stabilized transit agencies that had been going bankrupt, maintaining driver employment through the low-ridership decades of 1960s-1970s suburbanization. Section 13(c) protections continue to make transit bus driving one of the most comprehensively unionized large occupations in the US.

  • ADA accessible fleet mandate + low-floor buses

    The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 required all new transit buses to be wheelchair accessible and mandated complementary paratransit service for riders who cannot use fixed-route buses. Every bus agency in the country had to retrofit or replace its fleet; kneeling buses and then low-floor buses became standard. The ADA paratransit mandate also created a new class of bus driving, specialized demand-response paratransit service, that requires more complex passenger interaction skills than fixed-route driving: securing wheelchairs, communicating with passengers with disabilities, navigating residential streets. This expanded both the scope of the job and the training requirements for all transit operators.

    Effect on the work

    Net employment growth as paratransit created additional driver demand; job complexity increased with ADA compliance requirements and passenger interaction standards.

  • Smart-card fare systems + real-time bus tracking

    Two technologies changed the daily experience of transit bus driving in the 2000s-2010s. Smart-card fare systems (Chicago's ventra card 2013, NYC's OMNY rollout beginning 2019, DC's SmarTrip from 1999) reduced but did not eliminate fare-payment disputes: drivers no longer had to make change but still adjudicated edge cases. NextBus, founded in 1997 and deployed to major systems by the 2000s, gave dispatchers real-time vehicle location via GPS and gave passengers accurate arrival predictions via phone and stop signs. Real-time tracking improved schedule adherence, which meant drivers were held to more precise timing standards while simultaneously enabling the CAD/AVL (computer-aided dispatch / automatic vehicle location) monitoring that transit agencies use for performance management today.

    Effect on the work

    Reduced the cognitive load of cash fare handling; increased monitoring and scheduling precision. Neither displacement-threatening nor augmenting in a material wage sense: these were workflow tools.

  • AV transit pilots (Beep, May Mobility, Local Motors Olli): the stress test begins

    Beginning around 2017, a wave of autonomous vehicle companies launched small-shuttle pilots in geofenced areas: the intended predecessors to full AV transit-bus service. Local Motors deployed its Olli autonomous shuttle (IBM Watson-powered, 3D-printed, 12-passenger) at Lake Nona FL in 2017; the Olli program was retired in 2021 when Local Motors filed for bankruptcy. May Mobility launched in Detroit in 2018, then Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, and Grand Rapids; its December 2023 Sun City AZ driverless service was the most operationally mature of the small-shuttle deployments. As of 2025, not one of these systems operates a full-size transit bus on a mixed-traffic urban route without a safety attendant or operator. The gap between shuttle-in-a-parking-lot and bus-on-a-city-street has proven immense.

    Effect on the work

    Zero measurable employment displacement through 2025. The technology-optimism narrative stalled against transit-specific failure modes: lane changes, pedestrian interactions, bus stops in live traffic lanes, wheelchair lift protocols, and fare disputes that require human judgment.

  • COVID-19 ridership collapse + chronic driver shortage

    March 2020: transit ridership across the US collapsed within weeks as the pandemic shut down offices, schools, and non-essential activity. Transit agencies reduced service and furloughed or laid off thousands of drivers. Federal CARES Act emergency transit funding and subsequent COVID relief bills kept most agencies solvent through the crisis: drivers had a relatively protected position compared to private-sector transit workers. Recovery was slow and uneven: by 2024, the Federal Transit Administration reported most major systems had recovered to most 2019 ridership levels, but bus driver headcounts had not recovered proportionally. APTA tens of thousands of unfilled transit operator positions nationally in 2023-2024, driven by pandemic-era career departures, an improved non-transit labor market, and wages that in many markets had not kept pace with inflation. Agencies reduced service hours because they lacked drivers, which depressed ridership recovery: a self-reinforcing cycle.

    Effect on the work

    The driver shortage is the dominant near-term structural challenge: it is the counter-narrative to displacement.

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Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity employment and pay by year

On record since1828
Latest US employment159,240 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Latest US median pay$59,050 (May 2025)Source: BLS OEWS May 2025Official statisticReport an error
Outlook+4.1% by 2035Source: BLS Employment Projections 2025-35Official statisticReport an error
View all 12 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
YearUS employmentAnnual pay (median unless marked)SourceReport
1920135,000n/aEst., American Public Transportation… Researched contextReport
1945175,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1964120,000n/aEst., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
1981n/a$18,500Est., Wikipedia Researched contextReport
2000149,000n/aEst., American Public Transportation… Researched contextReport
2019179,510$43,030BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statisticReport
2020162,850$45,900BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statisticReport
2021145,720$48,620BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statisticReport
2022141,530$50,890BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statisticReport
2023184,990$60,170BLS OEWS May 2023 Official statisticReport
2024148,980$57,440BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statisticReport
2025159,240$59,050BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statisticReport
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