Humbolt bus crash update

[bevans6]

Driver has pled guilty to all counts. Investigators found that in the previous days and weeks he committed 70 federal and provincial DOT regulation violations, most related to log book violation and hours of operation violations. He pled to running the very large stopsign without braking at all. Bus driver locked up for around 25 meters before hitting the truck in the side - it was completely blocking the road as he came on it. Victim statements are being read into the record. Many are including the truck driver as a victim also, of a different sort, but still a victim in a way. Sentencing has yet to occur.
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/report-states-semi-driver-caused-123333736.html

[pabusnut]

Whatever the maximum is -- he should get that plus 20 years!
I am surprised that dangerous driving is all he was charged with--doesn't this situation warrant a manslaughter charge/

Hopefully they investigate the company that employed him as well. 

[Jim Blackwood]

Well... it's Canada right? They are very polite there.

Jim

[bobofthenorth]

We probably won't get a sentence this week or even this month.  The judge will no doubt want her 15 minutes of fame and the best way to get that is to deliberate.  I'm a little cynical about the log violations too.  If the right (or maybe WRONG) wienie makes the stop he'll find multiple "violations" in every log book on the road every day.  Maybe not 70 violations but I'd have to see what he's writing up.  Some of what has been published seemed pretty much chicken $#!% to me.

The bottom line in this tragedy is that the guy blew through a stop sign.  I'm not excusing his behaviour but I know that junction well and I can understand what happened.  Its a stop sign out in the middle of nowhere on a highway where you have the right of way all the way from Arborfield to Gronlid except for that one intersection. All the training in the world and all the logbook micro-management isn't going to change anything if a guy blows a stop sign.  A 5 year old kid riding in the back of mom's soccer van knows what those big red signs mean.  The only relevant question is why he ran the sign.  Every one of us who is honest has caught himself halfway through an intersection before realizing the light was red and every one of us has run a stop sign at least once in our life.  Fortunately the consequences aren't usually as tragic as they were that night.

[Fred Mc]

I don't disagree about the log book violations but he had ONLY been drving 3 weeks. That's like 3 or 4 a day.

What sticks in my mind is that the trucks speed was almost a normal highway speed.It wasn't like he was rolling thru which I'm sure lots of us do. That tells me that he was used to ignoring most rules of the road. And it's not like he had driven the same road a thousand times before.He had only been on the job 3 week.

[Jim Eh.]

He did state in court that his tarps had come loose and he had stopped to re-secure them. This would lead me to believe that his mind and focus was on load securement rather than vehicle operation.

Not too sure this would have been any less tragic if he hit a single occupant vehicle with an 80 year old behind the wheel. Highway tragedies occur all the time unfortunately. This one was sensationalized due to the circumstances and the results affected more people than just the immediate families. I am in NO WAY excusing the driver and the result of his actions will get him (and his new wife) deported. He and his family will have to live with his actions that day for the rest of his life as he should. However, there should be more blame put on the company that put him in that position. After all, the driver was the pitbull but it was the company owner that trained him and released him from the leash.
Also the driver licensing system also had a hand in this tragedy as well unless the system was circumvented somehow.

History cannot be reversed unfortunately, but hopefully the system faults can be changed to try and not let this occurrence repeat in the future.

[lostagain]

I cannot, as some people do, feel sorry for the driver. Stopping at a stop sign is pretty elemental. It doesn't take any training to know that. Any driver, of any vehicle, let alone a commercial vehicle, must exercise a "duty of care". That means paying attention while driving. A stop sign, with flashing red lights no less, must not be ignored. As much as he may be feeling sorry for his mistake, I would like to see a very long jail sentence for the SOB.

JC

[chessie4905]

Stop sign out in middle of nowhere...plainly visible? Only one for miles? Other road plainly visible? Is the other road a more traveled road? Should there have been a 4 way stop? Too many unknowns to make an opinion, other than he ran the stop sign. Intentional or accidental error? Never drove that road before? Speeding? Unfortunate accident. There are many locations everywhere that are poorly designed or insufficient signage. I remember a serious accident down near Atlanta where coach driver missed unexpected stop sign on off ramp and plowed through barricade.

[Fred Mc]

Sask is a large sparsely populated province( about the size ofCa. With pop. 1 mil). Traffic at that spot would be minimal probably a few cars per hour. So it's easy to think there won't be another vehicle "this time".  And there had been a similar accident killing another  family at that spot before. It would be prudent for the province to install traffic circles at those intersections. Pretty hard to ignore those.

[DoubleEagle]

I remember a serious accident down near Atlanta where coach driver missed unexpected stop sign on off ramp and plowed through barricade.

I believe that was the accident of a Charter Bus from Ohio where the driver mistook an off ramp for a continuing lane. He was going too fast to stop for that sign and went off the overpass and crashed, killing himself, his wife, and a number of students. He did not ignore it in that case, he was in the wrong lane and could not comply in time.

[Jim Blackwood]

I wonder how long he had been in-country and  where he came from? For instance in many developing countries such as India the traffic laws are routinely ignored. So how would a driver raised in that environment overcome those biases?

Jim

[niles500]

It appears that rumble strips and multiple flashing warning lights were warranted at this location , FWIW

[Jim Blackwood]

How about a railroad track-end barricade?

[bobofthenorth]

How about a railroad track-end barricade?

I don't know what this even means.

As usual, everyone has 20:20 hindsight but - as JC already pointed out - from about age 6 everyone knows what those red octagons mean.  This guy failed to stop at a stop sign.  The only question that matters is whether that was deliberate or inadvertent.

People who don't know "the big middle" of North America can't understand the space and isolation.  No doubt with the benefit of hindsight someone will install rumble strips at this particular intersection and perhaps they should have been there all along.  I know that spot well and if you had asked me a year ago whether there were rumble strips on the east/west highway I would have said "Probably".  There weren't and I expect they are already there now.  The problem is there are 100s of thousands of similar crossings out here and its not possible to put some enhanced feature on all of them.  I expect we'll hire some more bureaucrats to do some calculation about which crossings need added security features and we'll spend a few hundred million dollars installing those features but ultimately if drivers don't stop at stop signs then $#!% is gonna happen.

It doesn't just happen on the highways - I've responded to traffic incidents in the middle of nowhere.  Out here we have a north/south road pretty well every mile and an east/west road more or less every two miles.  That's a whole lot of grid crossings and despite the low population and low traffic density it is amazing how often two vehicles arrive at one of those crossings at the same second.  Some times the consequences are trivial and sometimes they are deadly.  A good friend of mine ended up a quadriplegic after one of those incidents.  An employee was hospitalized and the woman who hit him was killed on another occasion.  I responded to an incident where a woman drove her car clean under an ammonia truck.  She hit hard enough to shear the axle out from under the truck and obviously didn't survive.  It happens and it probably happens literally every day somewhere in western North America.  Its just that this time the consequences were unimaginable. 

[Jim Blackwood]

The point was that it wouldn't work. Consider if you will, Americans and Canadians mostly all drive and have for how many generations now? Enough to instill in every citizen an almost intuitive understanding of the rules of the road and we have become civilized about it. We even stop for pedestrians. Other countries, not so much. Take a country where even in the current generation not so may of them drive and the situation is very different. Things like stop signs are mere advisory distractions and might makes right. At their most busy intersections everybody crowds into what space they can find to get through just like at a crowded mall and the larger vehicles simply bull their way through. They have lots of accidents. It's accepted as the price of admission. When they come to intersections they are mostly concerned with avoiding anything bigger than their own vehicle. If you ride a bicycle or motorcycle you stay out of the way of literally everything else because they all can kill you.

Now take a driver like that and put him in a semi and what exactly do you think is going to happen? Will he suddenly, with a standard truck driving course change his ways? I think not. I think that driver saw the sign and simply ignored it because he was the biggest thing on the road and anything smaller was supposed to let him through, and it was probably the biggest surprise of his life when the bus hit him instead.

That right there is your problem.

Jim