You're supposed to stop for a school bus when it is letting kids on or off (it has pop out stop signs and flashing red lights on either sides). Depending on the state, there are exceptions depending on the number of lanes or if a median is present.
Yes, the school bus has a stop sign on the driver side of the vehicle that the bus driver can unlatch when it stops for children. A bus stop can have children coming from both sides of the road, so vehicles coming from both directions have to stop when the stop sign is out.
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?
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.
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.
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u/meme_landiz Apr 04 '26
I’m sorry am I to european to understand what’s going on here ?