Plan B Forum

Kids hit by other vehicles while crossing the road to get on or after getting off a school bus.

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/details-drive ... 49819.html

This one is about three siblings killed while crossing the street to get to the bus. 4-door pick up driven by female in mid-20s with three kids on board, traveling in the opposite direction from the school bus, before sunrise. Driver says she saw the flashing lights but did not recognize it was a school bus until too late.

This not a rare event nationally. Is Delaware the only state that requires school bus routes to be planned so that the students do not cross the street?

snailgate

There’s another story in the news today about this incident and two others; it appears in one case at least the driver plowed into kids on the side of the street. Are we going to eliminate bus stops altogether?

https://www-m.cnn.com/2018/11/01/us/tam ... cnn.com%2F

I think it’s great to arrange the route so nobody has to cross the road, though I’m not sure how feasible that is in all cases.

In this case, it appears it was perfectly feasible for the bus to pull into the trailer park, pick up the kids then loop around and pull back out onto the highway. In fact that is now the new plan, the school having changed the old plan now that 3 kids are senselessly slaughtered. The parents in the park have been begging for a change for some time, but were ignored; I’m sure that had nothing to do with them being trailer park parents.

Burning Petard wrote:This not a rare event nationally. Is Delaware the only state that requires school bus routes to be planned so that the students do not cross the street? snailgate

That is not a requirement here, but I think they try to set up routes that way.

It is not always possible though. Kids are often hit crossing in front of the bus on ONE WAY streets too, with the errant driver overtaking the bus from the rear. I don't understand how they can not see a huge yellow box with umpteen flashing lights from the rear either, but it happens.

Every year various news outlets run story after story about the laws involving stopped buses. It seems MANY drivers are unaware that they are required to stop EVEN on a four (or more) lane street when approaching from either direction. That applies unless there is a concrete median between the bus and approaching traffic from the front of the bus. (At least that's the law here. Local ordinances may vary.)

Around here they do so on surface streets not on neighborhood streets tho.

They did that when my brother was in school. Instead of his bus ride being 10 minutes, it was an hour. I clocked it: living <1 mile from the school, his bus ride was 22 miles.

When I was in middle school I had to walk a mile or more to school including crossing a heavily trafficked 4 lane 45mph major artery; I didn’t realize until I was older how fucked up that was. There was no lighted crosswalk within easy access so I basically had to wait for a break in traffic and hustle across 4 lanes hoping I hadn’t misjudged the speed of oncoming vehicles - it was scary sometimes. This was in Tempe, AZ.