You might have heard that school buses are the safest mode of transportation for school aged children. According to the NHTSA, only 1% of all student fatalities during normal school travel hours can be attributed to traveling by school bus. However, the safety of these vehicles can easily be compromised by unsafe bus drivers, such as those highlighted in a recent story from the Washington Post.
The Post found that traffic cameras observing Washington D.C. caught city school bus drivers speeding and running red lights hundreds of times in recent years. Even more worrying, the vast majority haven’t had to pay the fines for their violations.
From January 2009 to March 2013, D.C. school bus drivers accumulated 327 traffic-camera tickets, building up to $34,745 in unpaid fines. By the Washington Post’s estimates, the buses received tickets at a per-mile rate 16 times more frequent than the city’s fleet of Metro buses and other Metro vehicles combined. The violation rate of the school buses was only slightly less than that of city police vehicles, which typically trigger the camera systems while responding to emergencies. Obviously, tickets related to active-police are dismissed, but the same can’t be said for school buses.
The investigation by The Post found that school bus drivers had only paid about a dozen of the tickets received during that time, and none faced any disciplinary actions whatsoever, even when children were on board at the time of the infraction. City records show more than 20 of the drivers caught speeding and running red lights had also crashed school buses. Four of the crashes resulted in injuries. One bus in particular was photographed speeding and running red lights six times in a single month, while another driver was caught on camera speeding five times in five months.
Officials from the city said they were unsure whether any effort had been made to identify the drivers, but The Post didn’t have to work hard to identify many of the drivers by reviewing school bus logs obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. During their analysis of records, The Post also found the Office of the State Superintendent of Education, which is in charge of city school buses, did not even have policies in place for disciplining offenders.
To keep school buses as the safest mode of transportation for children across the country, we have to ensure that the buses and the drivers are held to the highest safety standards. It is absolutely not acceptable for such widespread misuse of buses to go unpunished, especially when many of the violations occurred with children on board.
Every department responsible for the transportation of one or more school districts has to have a plan in place to deal with negligent or reckless drivers before injuries are allowed to happen. The fact that some of these drivers caused accidents resulting in injuries, but were still allowed to continue driving buses afterword, is extremely disconcerting.
