school bus accident injures 8

While the accident was not the bus driver’s fault, the bus driver was driving without a license. From my perspective, the public school system and the city have a significant problem with irresponsible bus drivers.

The corner of 22nd & Marshall 4 way stop intersection is a perfect example. The buses that travel at night and in the early mornings often don’t even tap their brakes when they fly through the intersection at 30-50 miles an hour. During the day they do tend to slow down a little for the stop sign, but I have only rarely seen a bus actually come to a complete stop at the stop sign. When I try to walk across the intersection, the bus drivers actually get upset that they have to stop to let a pedestrian cross the street. When a bus almost hit me the other day and I yelled at the bus driver, the woman driving the bus flipped me off (she was ticked off that I slowed her down).

No joke, while writing this post I just saw a bus fly straight through the intersection without a pause at 6:50AM heading Westbound through the intersection.

The police really need to better patrol these intersections. The Schools and City need to send out hidden observers to watch these problem spots and remove these criminal bus drivers from their jobs. It’s a matter of time until someone gets killed. Hopefully a bunch of kids don’t get hurt on their way to school.

Elliot, thank you for the correction. I did mean to say 23rd & Marshall (sorry for the typo).

My wife and I have logged multiple verbal and written complaints to the police, GRTC, and the city, but nothing seems to change. We called GRTC again today and they claim they will “check the onboard cameras on the buses that were driving through the intersection at that time”.

My question is this. If they have onboard cameras, why aren’t they reviewing the tapes already on a random basis? If they were, they would know this is a massive problem because of the frequency of the violations. You would only need to look at one tape on any given day, for almost any given bus driver, and you would plainly see they aren’t stopping at stop signs in Church Hill (especially on Marshall Street)! Plus they are going 50+ MPH in a 25 MPH zones.

Stop signs aren’t suggestions. Speed limits aren’t suggestions either. This is particularly important when you are driving a multi-ton bus through the middle of a residential neighborhood that also has school buses regularly crossing the GRTC routes. The 23rd & Marshall intersection is actually one of those places that the school bus route heads due south on 23rd across the GRTC route that heads due East/West on Marshall. It’s a matter of time until one of these GRTC buses flies through the intersection at 50+ MPH without stopping and a school bus is simultaneously crossing its path southward at the exact same moment.

It’s a shame but it sounds like it is going to take an incident where 30 plus kids die at this 23rd & Marshall intersection before GRTC, the schools, the police, and the city decide to do something about this problem. Then it will be too late.

The school busses have been totally screwed up this year. They apparently tried to pare down the number of busses, then realized that they had a transportation problem. We have had at least three different drivers at our stop, as each new driver they hired didn’t work out. We have had problems with extremely (45 minutes or more) late busses or busses not showing up at all. Then one day, the bus came nearly 20 minutes early! When you have kids waiting on a city corner to catch a bus, you really need the busses to be more on time for safety’s sake.

Our kids need reliable transportation to school. We need to make sure this item is not slashed from the school budget this time. Let’s save money by firing Wilder’s body guards, or reducing administrative expense.