Speeding

Have you ever accidentally passed a school bus that was stopped?

Today I was driving on a double lane road, and there is a median that divides it from the opposite double lane road. The school bus was on the right side, I was in the left lane. The bus was slowing down, but only the yellow lights were on. The stop sign wasn’t deployed, and it wasn’t flashing red lights. I passed the bus, and the bus driver honked and yelled! I didn’t feel guilty about it, because the bus was still going about 15 miles per hour, and I was going the speed limit. I’m just worried the driver got my license, and I’ll get a ticket for not doing anything wrong. Your thoughts?

I drove a school bus for 21 years, just hung it up this year. In our state, unless the red stop arm is fully deployed, you can not be ticketed for running a stop arm. However, that said, the yellow lights are supposed to be a warning that the bus is going to stop soon, and people should be slowing down to stop, not hurrying up to try to beat the lights. Suppose the bus was slowing down, approaching a stop, yellow lights flashing, you pass the bus, as the excited small child enters the road from the opposite lane (admittedly wouldn’t happen in your case of the double lane road, but you get the mentality). While you wouldn’t be guilty of running a stop arm, you’d have a hard time explaining why you ran over a child while attempting to speed past the bus before the red lights came out. Should the child come out before the red lights are displayed? No. But, we’re talking about kids as young as 6…..they don’t always do what they’re supposed to do, and they tend to act on impulse. That’s one reason I took great care to choose my routes out in the country. Even though I drove miles and miles more than a lot of drivers with less seniority, the day that I’d meet more than a couple of cars was very unusual. I tended to get frustrated with people who would try to zip through the yellows….especially when I tried very hard to keep them off if a car was very close…yet still, cars with plenty of time to stop would sometimes SPEED UP just so they could zip through the lights and not have to wait the minute or two it would take to load the kids safely. In our school corporation, they’ve gone to making a lot of the heavier travelled roads “right side pick up/drop off only” just to try to keep the kids safe because so many people blow off the lights.

school bus at maximum speed !!!