A Detroit bus driver picks up unusual passengers as 2 horses and riders climb aboard
DETROIT (AP) — A city bus in Detroit briefly picked up some unusual passengers recently: two horses and their riders.
Camera footage from the bus shows it pulling up to a stop where two riders sitting atop the steeds are waiting near the curb. The laughing bus driver does not object to letting the group on board, saying, “If he can get in here, it is what it is” and “It's a service animal.” The footage, released by the city of Detroit on Friday, is timestamped Saturday, Nov. 7.
The riders dismount and lead their horses onto the bus through the front doors before promptly exiting the bus through another set of doors, the footage shows.
The city released the footage from the bus after bystander video of the unusual commuters hopping aboard drew attention online earlier in the week. That prompted city officials to criticize the incident.
Jordan Williams, who accompanied the horses, told WXYZ Detroit that he had been assisting with a fundraiser and giving children horseback rides when afterward he spotted the city bus and wanted to record a video.
“It wasn't like I was, like, tracking down the bus,” said Williams, co-founder of Urban City Cowboys. “It was like, ‘Oh, there’s the bus. Oh, there's the bus stop. Well, this kinda lining up for me.'”
Williams said that he's done this on multiple Detroit buses over the years. The point, he said, is “to bring light to the city that there are cowboys that look like us.”
Alexis Ware, a spokesperson for the Detroit mayor’s office, said in a statement that while the city welcomes service animals on buses, “it appears that these horses were brought on the bus for other reasons.”
“We recognize that the actions in the video were meant to draw awareness to a positive cause, however, we also acknowledge that this presented safety concerns for other passengers on public transit and for the horses themselves,” Ware added.
“This is an opportunity to retrain DDOT bus operators and to educate our Detroit residents on everything that we are doing to guarantee safe, timely and high-quality service through DDOT," Ware said.
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