03-02-2018, 07:53 AM
(03-01-2018, 11:19 PM)Pheidippides Wrote: Has anyone ever seen any statistics on the number of motorists charged under the section 142.1 of the HTA (yielding right of way to buses exiting from bus bays)? The law has been around for a while now, but I don't think I've ever seen or heard of anyone pulled over for this offense.
Anecdotally, it feels to that more and more drivers are not all yielding according to the law, let alone being plain old courteous, and are making unsafe choices. This results in the bus driver taking evasive action to avoid a collision that usually involves slamming on the brakes or accelerating hard to get back in to traffic after unsuccessfully waiting for a gap or someone to yield because they are getting behind schedule. Which then results in a poor experience for the passenger due to the delays and the jerky ride.
Like the SUV driver SB on King at Willis the other day who decided to floor it to beat the bus that was already halfway in to the lane and ended up driving parallel to the bus in the on-coming (NB) lane of King before over-taking the bus just before ducking in front of the bus to avoid smashing in to oncoming traffic (resulting in the bus having to brake hard).
They should start by easing off on bus drivers who are involved in minor collisions. Buses are big enough it would be more or less safe to just signal and pull out with relatively little regard for whether or not private vehicles are actually yielding (not “no regard”, just “relatively little regard”). OK, I don’t know how safe that really is, but I know they are too hard on drivers: I was talking to one who mentioned that banging a mirror on a sign results in a multi-hour delay while they go through the whole accident procedure. Something like that should be understood as just something that happens in the course of driving around the city. And we need a way of rapidly exonerating drivers whose buses are hit by another vehicle due to bad driving by somebody else, including failure to yield.
Really they should just have enforcement cameras installed on buses. This would also be useful for reviewing incidents. Driver could have a button that sends the immediately preceding timecode to a review office which would have the power to issue tickets just like a red light camera. I’m not sure if we need reform of the rules around charging people for moving offenses without a traffic stop. The way it should work is that the vehicle owner should be assumed legally to be responsible for the offense; if they weren’t driving, they may then respond by either reporting the vehicle stolen, or by pointing the finger at another specific individual who was authorized to use the vehicle at the time of the offense. If that person denies responsibility, it goes back to the vehicle owner. The whole issue of proving who was behind the wheel is, ethically and morally, a red herring. Cars are sufficiently dangerous that it’s reasonable to require their owners to have responsibility for who is driving them.