I think that's part of the problem here.
if it's 4 lanes with no turn lane or median/hard divider, the the kids can cross the highway … if hard divider/median then the bus has to make a return trip for any on the other side of the highway (at least that's my understanding)
donalson wrote: ouch everyone on the bus was ok... the honda driver not so much
They probably should do something about that. I don't have a problem decapitating people that run into school buses but it could probably traumatize the kids if they look at it. When I was 9 I saw a guy hit a truck and have his head crushed. I was shook up for a while after that.
wbjones wrote:plance1 wrote: wife thinks Im crazy because I always wanted to buy a school bus. That being said, for the life of me I can't understand why people are so amazingly stupid that they refuse to pass a school bus. Wait, I don't mean to say when the damn things are stopped with their little lights blinking and stop sign sticking out. I mean just as you're driving down a 4 lane road. Here in Cincinnati, I used to occasionally get off I71 and drive north on Kenwood Road (2 lanes each direction) to get to work. Inevitably there would be a school bus on the road. It would stop and do its thing. Then the person in front of me in the other lane would just refuse to pass the bus once it started moving again. So guess what, guess who got stopped behind the bus every block??????even worse are the holier than thou IDIOTS that don't know the rules about passing a stopped school bus … at least here in NC, if it's a divided highway (solid divide between opposing directions of traffic), you only stop if you're behind (as opposed to traveling towards) the bus same if it's a 4 lane, with a dedicated turn lane … you only stop if the bus is traveling the same direction you are … it's truly amazing how many idiots will slam on their brakes (when traveling opposite direction) in the above situations … and if you pass them, they'll try to catch up and give you hell for passing a stopped school bus had someone do that to me, and threatened to call the Police … I begged them to do it … when the officer got there, he flat chewed their ass for not knowing the driving rules … even talked about suspending their driving privileges until the proved they could pass a standard driving test … it was all I could do to stand there and not laugh out loud
I confess I'm not sure the rules, I always error on the safety around school buses when they're stopped. But if they're going down the road at 25 mph I have no problem going past them at 30.
In reply to plance1:
easy enough to figure out the rules .. go to your states driver license web site and search out the rules for your area … then you can be the same shiny happy person I am about people that don't know the rules 
My primary concern is they ride like the 60s straight truck tech they're based on(IE terrible), the worst are the short busses with wheelchair lifts, flat floor dictates about 1" of rear suspension travel. I think a study looking for correlation between kids who rode the bus and developing back problems later in life would be really neat.
Hal wrote: Those people calling for seat belts on school busses either have never watched a bunch of kids on a bus or have forgotten what they saw.
They make tradesmen up north in camp wear them everyday in the coaches used to transport to and from site. How hard can it be? 
In reply to HiTempguy:
You can't compare Canadian adults to American children. That's like comparing Jesus to Hitler.
Just to point at couple of things out, school busses have a DOT rollover test rating which no other large multi passenger vehicle has, and they carry a lot of weight. 80 150 pound teenagers is 12,000 pounds. They are most likely built to support a fully load of adults. So if it was a load of parents it could easily be 16,000 pounds or more. Also they are wider now because there was a federal regulation restricting width which was relaxed in the mid 90's.
As Matt Farah found out, a tuned up DT-466 will easily break the century mark...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i2Vu66vSaQ&index=6&list=PL843719E30A9BDFBA
Kenny_McCormic wrote: My primary concern is they ride like the 60s straight truck tech they're based on(IE terrible),
driven a large box truck? they ride the same way. Stick front and rear axles with big leafs to carry the load
In reply to HiTempguy:
Here the buckles get cut off and thrown out the windows at people and cars.
My dad's friend once bought a decommissioned school bus from a state auction for about $100 back in 2002. My dad's friend was a custom motorcycle builder that worked next door to him, and he bought it to convert it into a cheap motorcycle hauler/custom vehicle that they could take to big festivals like Rendezvous in NY. I was working for my dad at the time, and I remember him randomly pulling the bus up to my dad's warehouse door and honking the horn to pick him up so they could go as fast around the building as the bus would go. He got it up on two wheels once. 
Ah school buses. I remember one driver who had it down, he'd come down the street pretty fast (fully loaded), swerve into the school loading area which is raised above the street about 2-3 feet, and would get about 6" of air under the front tires, then brake hard. This wasn't the little weenie buses, this was the dual rear axle version... bus #12, geez, I still remember.
No exagguration on the 6" of air either. Can't do that any more, but all of us would crowd onto that one bus because we knew it would be a fun ride (it commuted between two schools, so it didn't matter which one you got on). Good times.
Best looking school bus had the IH Clown Truck front end.
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