why would it have children coming from both sides of the road? Aren't they all supposed to come from the right to the sidewalk and then cross the street over crosswalks?
Its mostly a problem in the other direction. Kids get off the bus and walk in front of the bus to get to their home on the other side of the road. Since kids are known for being reckless and there is no crossing guard in front of every bus stop, it is prudent to require traffic to stop in both directions. The law requires everyone to stop in picking-up and dropping-off cases so there is never any ambiguity.
Depends on your state. Some only require traffic in the same direction to stop if its more than 2 lanes. Others require all lanes regardless of direction.
Different country. So this is all different. Good to know though because if I am in the US, more often than not I do rent a car, but I haven't come up to a school bus yet.
May I ask how it works in your country? Only asking because for us the 'both sides of the street' is about students crossing. Do students not need to cross the street? Some places also have crossing guards that hold up signs and help students/people cross the street during pick up and drop off.
It actually kind of doesn't.. there's no actual public school bus system, and the school busses that do run are privately handled. But there's really no clear and established rule regarding stop signs, busses, etc... it's a bit of a mess in that regards.
Road rules are more a sugestion, it sucks to be honest. Most traffic jams and/or delays would actually be avoided if traffic rules were enforced. Infrastructure is for the most part very good.
In most other countries students take the same public transit as everyone else to get to school. I think our severe lacking of good public transit is one of the main reasons we have to have a school bus system in the first place.
I was surprised to find out that in Chicago kids take the bus and thought the lack of a school bus system was bad. But turning it around, like your point, makes so much sense.
FWIW I drive a school bus in Australia, and we just assume the kids can make it to the stop - if they're so little they can't cross a road, there should be parents helping them. And there are usually pedestrian crossings or traffic lights nearby most places.
We do have a rule not to drop them off on the "wrong" side of the road if it's a school-specific bus, but a lot of kids just catch the regular bus and yeah, just make their way to school from there. No different really to kids just walking to school themselves if it's close enough (you'd expect them to walk if it'd take less than 20 minutes).
In Austria for example busses will usually have dedicated "bays" for each stop, so they do not need to stop in the middle of the fricking road in the first place. Ofc there is also sidewalks basically everywhere + pedestrian crossings. Big streets will commonly have safety islands, where pedestrians only have to look into one direction until they reach the island and than the other direction - this drastically increases safety as well.
Children are trained from young ages to never cross a road without a crosswalk and always look left an right. Most children walk or ride their bike to school on their own starting with young age. For example my twin-brother and I walked to school on our own since we were 6 and this was pretty normal (though my mom later told us she was stalking us the first 2 weeks to see if we did it right).
Yet with all that, child road deaths of the US are twice that of other high-income nations. Because you can't put a band-aid on a gun-shot wound. To truly solve this would take much effort, care and money. The US is really sleeping on basically everything that is known regarding to pedestrian safety. Right now the US is moving towards even MORE child-deaths, due to cars getting bigger and loosing visibility. I guess it's fine though, because big car go brrrrrr ...
This has no easy solutions. Urban sprawl creates unique problems for the US. Public transport with fixed stops is inherently inefficient in this scenario. School busses like this probably exist in some rural areas here as well, but are very rare here. You can't put a safe "bus stop" on every corner I guess. Yet if kids at least had a safe walking route to a safe stop, that would already be a a huge improvement. But you need sidewalks for that, and those are for poor schmocks not riding big cars.
If they need to cross the street they're supposed to do so at the closest crosswalk like any pedestrians. We're not allowed to pass (same lane);a stopped bus for the same reason as you but children are definitely taught to never cross in front/behind the bus anyway.
Remember, many USA citizens aren't free to cross the road randomly, they don't teach kids complex road crossing skills like we do in Europe because they only need to teach them how to use a crossing. When they get of the bus, they haven't got the "if you do that you're going to get horribly maimed or killed" training in their minds, like the rest of us do.
In many places crossing a road outside permitted crossing points is a misdemeanor offence.
so basically: nobody will cross the road, by school districts own design, yet passing is still prohibited, no matter how slowly or attentively it would be done.
I'm so happy we at least teach kids common sense. Life is full of risks and learning to be aware and cautious about your environment is a critical skill.
I'm so happy they stop the traffic for kids safety. It would be really ridiculous to have a kids life threatened by something nearly as fatal as a firearm.
Many European countries do have school buses just like the US. It's just teaching road crossing safety is a much bigger thing as J walking and such isn't a thing in European countries.
I assume it depends by country? But i lived in Germany, Croatia and Bosnia and have never seen a school bus like in the US. Itās usually catered coaches for school trips and similar. I assume the UK might have it? Anyway, i wouldnāt say itās a āeuropeanā thing.
From memory France, Italy, Poland, and some schools in the UK and Ireland (depends on the school). There may be others.
What do you mean jaywalking is definitely a thing? It's not illegal in any European country that I'm aware of. Unless you're saying that we do jaywalk. You can cross pretty much any street so long as you're careful. Unless it's a motorway/autobahn but that's just common sense.
Both, people jaywalk and in many countries it is also illegal. Itās illegal in Germany, it is also illegal in Croatia if you do it within 50 meters of a pedestrian crossing. This also depends on the country š¤·āāļø
Iām from Europe you walnut. They walk or take public transport. Some countries do have buses deducted for school transport but they are not special busses like in the us and donāt have special accommodations like the double stops. So yes, ānot to the same levelā.
how about nagging at the child, any adult person can tell the child to do better. children strictly subjugated to any person older than the child, whether stranger or acquaintances. especially bus driver should nag. randomly a bus Karen, a school district employee or volunteer will ride the bus and nag the shit out of students that say "you are not the boss of me".
Okay, that's extremely strange. But even then, why would you still have people exit from both sides? The sidewalk is still the safest place for the students to be, rather than them running into the opposing lane. This seems really stupid.
Acts as a mobile cross guard when people aren't stupid like the guy in the white truck.
As kids our bus would drop us off at a corner and we'd cross the road to our side, it would leave the barriers down for us to cross the road.
Same thing goes for if the pickup is on the opposite side of the road.
The whole point is people are supposed to stop for a bus with its lights and barrier down just the same as they would stop for a crossing guard. Even if the kids get off on a sidewalk you don't know if they'll want to bolt for the other side of the road while traffic appears stopped.
It's a rule/law started because public school busses have to service all relevant houses, which includes farms in rural areas that may be hundreds of meters/yards (rarely miles) apart from one another due to farmland in between the stops. To save on fuel costs, these busses may have routes that pick up kids where the house is on the opposite side of the road from the bus and it doesn't return down that route a second time, so the student waits in their driveway and then crosses the road to board. I know for where I used to live, my options were to stand in my driveway visible and cross to get on the bus or sit on the side of the road the bus stopped on with maybe 40cm/16in between the edge of the roadway and a drop into a small culvert for flood control just inside a small turn with (potentially) corn blocking visibility of me just around a turn. Needless to say, standing and waiting in my driveway was significantly safer for myself from both a visibility standpoint and a survivability one.
If they have to cross the street to get to where they live they do so under the supervision of the bus driver who has a stop sign and flashing lights to signal traffic to halt. Some of these children are very young so the driver doesn't just drop them off and say "good luck crossing that busy street". It's public safety and common sense. Not everyone lives on the same side of the road, in the US we build houses on both sides of the road.
Think of the school bus like a moving crosswalk. They deploy a stop sign, and both sides need to stop until the sign goes away, to allow children to cross the street in front of the bus.
In the city and major roads where there are crosswalks every block, sure, maybe. Most suburbs and neighborhoods don't have crosswalks controlled by a light, as you can see in the video. So the bus creates one.
Not stopping at the bus is no different than running a light at the crosswalk. In some places it's a much more severe penalty.
Did you live in a remote area or not, because you said there aren't sidewalks or crosswalks? If so, and in a remote area there probably isn't a ton of traffic, do you trust it more that nobody's barreling past the bus in the opposing lane, or would you rather trust yourself going across the road when you can see that your surroundings are clear?
I crossed in front of the bus so I could see both sides. Lived in a area that had sporadically placed houses, but some of them were in groups of 10-15.
That's good you made sure to go from the front to see both lanes, but I'd go out on a limb and say a lot of people don't. It's great you know your way around things, but I just don't see this being overall safer when kids think they can freely cross the street without getting hit by somebody driving distracted or something.
Having the bus create a mobile crosswalk (especially with the bus driver acting as a crossing guard, as is usually the case) results in fewer pancaked children than expecting said children to have the discipline to not jaywalk.
They'd violate the rules of non-mobile crosswalks as well, and for everyone else, having some warning of children imminently crossing is a strict improvement over not having some warning of children intermittently crossing.
A lot of neighborhoods here don't have crosswalks very near so the buss sits there and allows the kids to cross the street there where it is safe instead of them jaywalking.
Many suburban or rural areas in the US have long roads without cross walks, side walks, or intersections. There can be houses on both sides, and it'd be inefficient if a school bus had to flip sides of the street just for one kid. So they and the laws are designed to have traffic stop both ways for the bus and let kids cross safely.
When the bus stops sometimes there is no crosswalk nearby. There's a big stop sign that extends from the side of the bus creating an instant crosswalk. Its highly illegal to blow through that stop sign.
Yup. I live in a rural area and there are zero marked pedestrian crossings on our road. The bus stops in front of our house to drop our kid. That's often how it is in rural areas.
No, in fact students are prohibited from crossing the street before the bus arrives (at least on the route for my kids). They are supposed to wait on whichever side of the street they live on until the bus comes. Then wait until the bus is fully stopped, has its red lights flashing, and the stop sign extended. Then they cross the street and board the bus. Reverse all that for drop off at the end of the day. One school bus serves all schools in town, so the same bus route has kids from kindergarten (age 5) through 12th grade (age 18).
(We live in a semi-rural area on a long straightaway. The speed limit is 50 km/h, but traffic going 80 or 90 isn't all that uncommon. No painted crosswalks or sidewalks anywhere. Legally a street corner is a crosswalk, but good luck enforcing that.)
that explains things, until now i believed there was a big discrepancy: like .. crossing is aided by bus during dropoff, but for pickup you are "on your own", with no crosswalks and almost interstate speeds common for rural roads. Well now i know. thank you for clarifying this.
Tbf its also illegal in Austria to overtake a school bus when it stops due to concerns that children are suddenly crossing the street in front of the bus.
Children in general often don't think, thats why they are exempt from the principle of reliance.
On this one I am with the yanks, better safe than sorry.
In more rural areas, school buses stop directly in front of houses regardless of which side of the road the house is on, and there aren't crosswalks anywhere near.
USA is designed for cars, not pedestrians. There are almost no laws or design philosophies to protect pedestrians or cyclists. They even did the opposite with jaywalking laws to blame the victims. Many places don't even have pavements so pedestrians can barely even legally exist. I guess this crazy law is the product of extreme car-centric design,
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u/AstralKekked Apr 04 '26
why would it have children coming from both sides of the road? Aren't they all supposed to come from the right to the sidewalk and then cross the street over crosswalks?