For “D,” a Santa Rosa school bus driver, it’s only a matter of time before a child here is killed or injured by a car whose driver ignores the law and passes a school bus despite its flashing red lights and stop sign.
Already, 15 to 20 times a day drivers “blow, creep or blatantly roll” by D’s bus as students are getting on or off, D said in an email to the Road Warrior.
And that’s just one bus. There are dozens of school buses on county roads each day.
“This is becoming a dangerous situation, which, unfortunately, like any other traffic hazard, will require the loss of a student’s life before something is done about it,” D warns.
There have been close calls.
“I had once incident where a driver passed my bus on the right as I was unloading students …” D writes. “As the first student was exiting I had to reach out and snag the back loop on his backpack, pulling him backward as the truck sped past an inch or so from the open door. This kind of thing happens every other day for us out there.”
D’s boss says the problem is getting worse.
Leland Kinard, who’s in charge of First Student Inc.’s local school bus operation serving Santa Rosa and Petaluma city schools, said that as traffic has increased, so has the number of violations that his drivers report. Luckily, he said, no student or driver ever has been hit.
He said illegal passing is common along sections of Range Avenue and West Steele Lane in Santa Rosa and parts of Santa Rosa Avenue and Old Redwood Highway.
While noting “most of the motoring public does well,” Kinard said “it’s amazing how many people go through the red lights” of the buses.
Kinard said his bus drivers try to write down the license plate numbers and drivers’ descriptions of violators, and that information is sent to the local CHP office. The CHP sends a warning letter to the car’s registered owner.
D writes, “I have asked SRPD, So. Co. Sheriff’s Dept. and the CHP for help, from calling their main offices to speaking to officers on the street, begging them for help before one of my kids gets hit. This has been to no avail.”
CHP Officer Jon Sloat said the local CHP office gets about three to five complaints of violations a day and that number has been steady in recent years. Santa Rosa Police Sgt. Rich Celli said SRPD gets a couple of complaints a year about illegal passing of buses.
Sloat and Celli said any complaints are taken seriously, and officers have staked out bus routes, looking for violators. Kinard said the CHP and SRPD have responded when he’s asked for extra enforcement.
“If there are more complaints out there, I would like to hear about it,” Celli said.
For someone actually ticketed by police and convicted, it’s a $666 fine in Sonoma County, once all of the state and county fees are added in, according to the local courts. And the DMV could suspend your license for a year.
Sloat says these are the laws covering school buses:
-–If a school bus is flashing its red lights and/or has a stop sign out on two-lane roads, drivers going both directions must stop.
-–If the bus is on the other side of a divided road, whether it’s two lanes or more, and the road has some sort of divider, such as concrete or dirt, OR is on the other side of a multi-lane road of two lanes or more in each direction, you don’t have to stop because you’re going in the opposite direction. BUT you do have to stop on divided and multi-lane roads if you’re going the same direction as the bus.
-–On two-lane roads with two sets of double yellow lines in the middle, you have to stop if you’re going the same direction as the bus. You do not have to stop if you’re going the opposite direction.
