HOLLYWOOD — Otis Pruitt drove the Boulevard for so long that riders set their mornings by him, and when he pulled to a stop a minute early they would tell him so, and he would wait the minute out with the doors open rather than leave anyone behind.

Mr. Pruitt, who drove a city bus line along Hollywood Boulevard and down Vine Street for thirty-one years, died February 10 at a hospital in Glendale. He was 88. His daughter said the cause was pneumonia.

His route ran through the middle of everything and stopped for all of it. He carried the morning commuters and the school kids, the hotel workers heading to the night shift, the tourists who boarded confused and got off reassured because he had told them where to stand and when to get out. He learned the regulars, held the bus a few seconds for the ones he could see running, and kept a roll of transfers and a supply of patience for the ones who had neither fare nor anywhere warm to go.

“Otis ran that bus like it was his living room and you were a guest in it,” said Curtis Lemieux, who rode Pruitt’s line to work for years and later became a driver himself. “He’d call out the stops in this voice, and he knew half the bus by name. You didn’t feel like cargo. That’s rare, and it was all him. The route doesn’t require it.”

Otis Pruitt was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1937 and came to Los Angeles in 1959. He drove a delivery truck before he took the transit job, and he stayed with it because he liked people and the schedule let him coach youth baseball in the afternoons. He drove through the years when the subway was dug beneath his route, watching the station rise at Hollywood and Vine, and he told riders where the trains would go long before they ran.

He retired in the 1990s but kept riding the bus as a passenger, sitting near the front, occasionally advising younger drivers whether they wanted it or not. To the end he could recite the stops of his old line in order, a litany of corners, and did so for his grandchildren, who did not always understand why it made him happy.

Mr. Pruitt is survived by two daughters, Gwendolyn Pruitt of Los Angeles and Marva Chatham of Houston; a son, Ronald, of Las Vegas; six grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a great many former riders. His wife, Lois, died in 2020.

His transit badge, worn smooth, was pinned by his family to the lapel of the suit he was buried in. His daughter said it was the only thing he had asked for, years in advance, and the request had come with a small joke she repeated at the service: that he had driven the whole city for thirty-one years, and intended to reach the last stop on time.