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.

The older I get the less I care when stuff like that happens to me. A lot of people on the road are either selfish, distracted or both, and I have decided to just not let it bother me. You're not going to teach anyone to be considerate by reporting them to the police. If anything, they'll probably just resent cyclists even more than they did before. I think of it as a test of my serenity and one-ness with the bike.

That's easy for you to say, you're a Jedi Master! :)

There is great benefit to reporting these incidences to local police. It can affect public attitudes and in the extreme cases can affect policy decisions on policing and even road construction.

There was a nutcase (quite literally, the guy needs psychiatric care) around here who was actively running motorbikes and other people off the road - but specifically targeting motorcycles. If it hadn't been for multiple reporting of the guy w/a description of his car, he'd have killed somebody - cyclist, pedestrian, motorcyclist, etc.

https://www.kildarenow.com/news/pens...untains/116882

In fact, it's completely not unreasonable to think he could have caused a fatality in the past, with the "single-vehicle motorcycle fatality" being not totally uncommon. People just assume motorcycles "go too fast", but it can also be due to bad road conditions, or other very bad road users.

Couple of years ago a guy in a creeper van followed me really close for a few blocks, then came up along side me really close, then intentionally right hooked me so I had to really jam on my brakes to avoid hitting him. I made a mental note of his license plate number and called the local police when I got home to report the guy. They said I would have to come into the station to file a report and they probably wouldn't do anything anyway. So you go ahead and report whoever you want to the police. It's not worth my time.

It's funny that this is your argument against acting for (potentially) the good others when you'd previously said,

I guess you'd included yourself among the selfish lot, eh?

Yes. Everyone is. That's what I said before.

No, you said, "a lot." You also implied some superior level of serenity, so I thought it all amusing.

I don't get it. Why is it amusing that someone doesn't let bad drivers bother them and also doesn't report bad drivers to the police because they think it's a waste of time?

I know.

Ad hominem? Wow. I must have really struck a nerve. Sorry about that.