I hate victim blaming.

To the OP, I think you handled the situation just as well as anyone.

I'm saying that it looks like it was a long straight road with plenty of visibility. My guess is that the bus driver looked right, saw the white car (maybe at same time blocking the OP) and no other cars behind it were visible of concern. Then the driver was focused on the traffic from the left clearing. IOW, I'm assuming the bus driver didn't also cut off a bunch of cars coming from his right, and the bus driver knew this. The other viewpoint is that the bus driver did this intentionally to the cyclist.

I do too and it is not my intention to blame the rider. Nevertheless, it's still a great opportunity to point out that the burden of our safety lies with us. We can't count on other people, specially drivers of big vehicles to see us and give the space we need.

If you analyse the situation calmly and detached from emotion you will see that the rider himself also did not see the bus coming at him until very late to react. Look at the 10 second mark on the video the bus is already crossing the road and the rider still haven't reacted, in fact if you continue the video you'll see looking at his shadow that he is still pedaling into the intersection.

That's your opinion. In my opinion it's not clear at all that the driver didn't look. As any driver will attest, when you prepare to pull out of a driveway you're looking predominately for motor vehicles, not a bicycle. It's rather easy to overlook a bicycle under even the best conditions. Unless we are in that driver's brain, it's not clear at all what he saw.

100% agree. Who's got the most to lose?

Negligence is still not acceptable when you are professional driving a bus load of children...

Perhaps if you don't have decent bike handling skills but I didn't see anything you could consider remotely risky by the OP. He rode off onto the shoulder. A little bumpy but hardly something that would get you killed.

I think he's referring to that STYLE of riding, I.e. Not yielding to the giant yellow 18,000 pound death machine, not necessarily riding off the road into the dirt

We only need to observe the video, there's no need to be "in that driver's brain".

"Didn't look", or simple driver error, is extremely common, and would account for pulling out in front of a cyclist (or any vehicle). It's always "rather easy" to not see something when you do not look.

But if any driver "looks but does not see", that's a much bigger problem: they shouldn't be driving; and especially not a school bus.

Of course it is up to us to be hyper-vigilant of these bad drivers. But I don't agree with the mentality of "bad driver apologists", that it's easy to overlook cyclists, or we're particularly difficult to see. If the burden were more squarely placed on motor vehicles to look for cyclists and pedestrians, the roads would be much safer.

Yeah, but that's never going to happen here in our car-centered culture. The OP did what he needed to avoid a close call. He had time to react and did so accordingly. I mean travelling at 25-30 km/h he could have stopped within a dozen meters or so, well short of the path of the bus. But that's not point we're discussing here, is it?:rolleyes:

Clearly both were bad. Young kids acting stupid is unfortunately nothing new in the world and most of us would have reacted similarly.

I love when people act like thru traffic is supposed to yield to left-turning vehicles entering the road.

Exactly, accidents do happen. I doubt the driver would have pulled out if he/she had seen you beforehand.

Or he did see and decided he could get out in front of that nuisance of a cyclist and avoid following him for the two minutes. Saving two minutes is worth putting someone else's life and safety at risk, right? C'mon, back me up on this.

I'd really like to back you up but I'd like to give the bus driver the benefit of the doubt and say he/she simply didn't see the rider. I'd venture to guess that as a collective here we more than likely take the extra time to scan for cyclists while we're behind the wheel, right? I'd also have to say that any other driver out there who doesn't ride a bicycle on the roads on a regular basis does not have the mindset to look for a bike, they look both ways see no cars coming and they go.

I am being facetious, of course, with my comment about someone's safety being worth two minutes of a driver's time, but not about the driver seeing and still deciding take the chance anyway, because that's the mindset many drivers have around here.

Case in point, when I am waiting to make a right turn at a red light and the are cars coming across the intersection on the center lane but the right lane is unoccupied I will still wait until traffic is clear or there is a large enough gap for me to safely make that turn. I will not turn onto the unoccupied lane with cars whizzing by full speed mere feet away from my turning vehicle. It's not worth the risk. However, drivers regularly do this, and it is one of the things irks me the most. As the driver going through the green light at full speed I am weary of that right-turning car straying into my lane as I go through the intersection. So, the driver sees me coming through the intersection and yet still makes that turn. What if I have to change lanes in the middle of the intersection to avoid an oncoming car making a left turn? I'm going to slam right not the right-turning vehicle, driver side.

To me this is one of the stupidest moves a driver can make. It's not worth it to save perhaps 10 seconds, yet it happens so often that it's accepted practice. If fact, so much so that the guy behind you would wonder why you aren't turning when there's an open right lane.

It's still negligence on the driver's part. Malicious or not, OP could have ended up just as dead and it's something that the driver's employer should know about.

Seems to be the "there's no such thing as accidents" theory. Every 'accident' that's ever happened is someone's negligence and that person's employer should be told. Is that the consensus?

It's a data point - what the employer decides to do (or not do) with it is up to them, but providing them with it may help to establish whether it's a one-off deal or if it's part of a concerning pattern. I'm not advocating that the OP should call the employer, frothing at the mouth and demanding their job be terminated. I'm saying that the driver's actions could have caused serious bodily harm and it's worth pointing out.

I think that if your job revolves around safety, and you do something unsafe, it should be reported. If you are driving a bus load of children around for a living and you have a lot of "accidents", maybe you should reconsider your job. If you don't reconsider yourself, maybe your boss should reconsider it for you before you kill people.

Yes, gregf83 misread grizzly59, but I'd expand on grizzly59's comments to add that going off the road into a ditch is in fact risky, though I'll grant gregf83's position it was not a life-threatening detour.

All the same, and without judging the OP at all because I'm only seeing a video, it does look as though I'd have elected to brake, slot in behind bus, and stay on the road.

That's hindsight on a dangerous situation, though, and I'm just happy our friend wasn't injured.

FWIW, I disagree with that, and agree with Silvercivic that some jobs warrant more oversight than others. Ruining 20 pizzas and killing a cyclist isn't the same as killing 20 kids and cyclist. It's horrible for the cyclist either way, of course, but the scale of devastation is different; I'd be satisfied cussing out a pizza delivery driver for a sketchy maneuver , but much more profoundly concerned about a school bus driver.

That said, this incident does not even meet the bar of "sketchy" in my mind, and is an error the type of which not only happens all the time, but is totally unavoidable. Misjudgement, mistakes, and errors are immutable facts of life.

What the bus did was dumb.

It doesn't appear you slowed down at all as the bus was making the turn.

Did you see the bus pull out?

While it's hard to be sure (I wasn't there), it doesn't seem that you had to "slams on the brakes".

It's possible slowing down more (without slamming on the brakes) would have been enough and being slower would have made baking out into the ditch less risky.

(It appears you handled the ditch fine but you don't know what's there.)

As a normal driver, the bus driver is required to notice the cyclist.

As a professional driver, even more so.

While it's understood that "people make mistakes", there isn't an excuse to make them.

The cyclist was there and the bus driver should have yielded (that's all we know).

If the bus driver looked, he did not do so to the required level of competency.