I left a little late for work today, and had the misfortune to get stuck behind a school bus. In a residential area, no less. :rolleyes:
Part One:
Am I the only one who knows you’re supposed to STOP when the bus has its flashers on? I saw cars constantly speeding past on the other side of the road. Someone behind me even tried to pass, on a solid yellow line, but then turned right at the next cross street.
The bus would put the yellow flashers, then they’d turn red and the Stop sign with red flashers would pop out from the left side of the bus. That means you STOP and WAIT.
The yellow and red lights are just like traffic lights, you fucking asswipes! Yellow means “Slow down and prepare to stop” and Red means “Stop.”
Right?
Nope. Apparently, it means you just keep on going, cell phone in one hand, coffee cup in the other. The hell with the kids who might be getting on their school bus.
The other moron behind me even honked at me for stopping, and motioned furiously at me to keep going. Excuse me, but I have to stop. I’d rather not have a seven-year-old splattered across my car. Fucking morons. Part Two:
Good God Almighty, just how freaking lazy are the kids these days?
This bus stopped every fucking 100 feet to pick up two or three kids. Why the hell can’t they all walk their lazy little asses to the corner and all get picked up at once? How inefficient is it to stop at every other house to pick up a couple of kids?
Have we reached a point where we’ve coddled our precious Dylans and Madelines so much that they can’t walk more than 15 feet to catch the bus? Guess they wouldn’t want to scuff up their $150 Nikes.
Hell, I walked half a mile just to catch the bus. Up hill. Both ways.
OMG, I’ve turned into my father.
1.) The one and only time someone blew the horn at us for stopping behind a school bus, my husband unfolded all 6’7" 200+ (buff) pounds of himself out from behind the wheel of our Passat and walked back to the asshat who honked to have a little discussion about his problem. I don’t think that guy has ever blown at anyone at a school bus stop again.
2.) It could be the law that causes the frequent stops. I know that when we were in Pennsylvania, younger kids weren’t allowed to walk as far away from their homes to catch the bus as the older ones, so while all of the high schoolers got picked up at the entrance to our subdivision, the middle schoolers were picked up at several points inside of the subdivision and the younger elementary kids were picked up right at their own homes. Everyone eventually learned which routes to take out to the main roads in the morning so as to avoid the big yellow scourges.
I don’t know what kind of neighborhood all this took place in, but Little Sister lives in a nasty neighborhood, so the buses stop at kids’ houses rather than at collective dumping points. Keeps the kids from having to walk down streets where drug deals are going down all over the place and safe drivers are a rarity.
In some places the kids aren’t even waiting outside their houses. Mommy & Daddy won’t let their precious little angel™ a chance to face to big bad world. So he or she stays inddors until the bus shows up, then walks out o the the bus. This adds about 30 seconds per stop and is totally uneeded.
Don’t blame me, I walked to school. Of course, we had this advanced technology in the city called “sidewalks”. Suburbanites shun them and say they attract theives, just like bike paths and public transportation.
Oooooooo!! Ooooooo! Mr. Kotter!! I have a story about shcool buses!!!
/Arnold Horshack/
Back when I was going to jr. high/high school, way back in the mid-late 80’s, the bus made 3 or 4 stops in its section of the development, so the kids would all gather down on one of the street corners and harass the elderly while we waited for the bus.
J/K about that last bit:p
Anyway, one day the bus came and we were all getting on, and suddenly a car came up behind the bus, which still had it’s flasher and STOP sign out, and the car swerved and went by.
The next sound was of metal crunching into metal, mixed with glass shattering.
Turns out the kids up the street were pulling out of their driveway and the asshat plowed into them.
The best part was that he was arrested by the cops.
It’s funny, I walked to my elementary school every day. It was maybe 1/3 of a mile away. That was from 1974-1981.
Now, no kids in the neighborhood walk to school, they are all driven.
ALL of them.
Why?
because mommy and daddy are terrified of the child molesters that live in the neighborhood.:rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Hey mom & dad, if you are so scared of them, why the hell don’t you go to the cops about them?
Could it be that Mommy and Daddy are actually more concerned about the asshat drivers – you know, the kinds who pull out around stopped school busses? People rushing to work are often impatient and stupid. If there aren’t safe sidewalks or crosswalks, driving the kids makes more sense.
It also gives the family a little bit more time to spend together in the morning. In a two working parent, busy household, all extra time is good time.
I think here if the bus is stopped, the traffic going the other way doesn’t have to stop if the road is one of those divided ones with grass in the middle.
I was driven to school by my parents all through elementary school, middle and high school, as was my sister. My parents were pretty overprotective though, but that’s other rant. They were afraid of something happening to us, probably kidnapping more than anything else. My mom didn’t work though, so it was just a safety issue. Only my younger brother, now in high school, was ever allowed to ride the bus to or from school, and that wasn’t until about the 10th grade.
I remember asking to ride the bus with the other kids many times, or ride a bike to school, but the answer was always no. I never got to go over to other kid’s houses to play either because my parents didn’t trust their parents to supervise me properly or not blow cigarette smoke in my face or not play dirty movies or something.
The bus stopping every 100 yards is a little bizarre, but it’s the drivers who drive through the bus stop lights that drive me fucking insane.
If you want to kill somebody’s kid for no good goddamn reason, drive through the bus’s stop signal. They’re there for a fucking reason, and that fucking reason is that kids used to get fucking killed (and still do) getting on the bus. Kids, in fact, are quite a bit more likely to die getting on the bus than they are in an accident while riding the bus.
I always, always, always note the license plate of people who drive thru stopped school bus signals and I call the police. There’s no excuse for that. It’s idiotic and dangerous.
My house is within, say, 2 blocks of the school. There isn’t even streets or homes between my house and the school, just school property and a park in a very safe community. A walking path goes right from the corner of my yard to the school.
When I first moved in, I walked out to get in my car and go to work on a beautiful Fall day. Birds singing, 70 degrees. My next door neighbors two children, ages 11 and 10 were waiting on the corner. I asked what they were waiting for and the said the bus.
Confused, I pointed and asked “Isn’t that the school you go to?”.
“Yes”, they responded.
“Why don’t you walk to it?”, I asked.
“It’s too far”, was the response.
I must be getting old because my thoughts at that moment echoed all the old geezers I heard when I was that age, about how the young are lazy, spoiled, etc.
I walked to school when I was a kid. It wasn’t the molesters* that were dangerous (we walked in a group of about 8 kids), it was the traffic. It was just under a mile away and half the walk was on an extremely busy street. In fact, the only intersection we had to navigate had more accidents than any other intersection in the state.I would never let my kids walk on that road because of the idiot drivers. However, my mom didn’t have any choice in the matter. She didn’t have a car of her own. And the exercise was good for us.
FWIW, my two princesses are dropped off at the top of the street. Very few kids have curb to curb service. A severely handicapped neighbor of mine has curb to curb service and it takes about 5 minutes to get her unloaded, but I can’t complain about it because getting her to sit up in a chair unaided was a huge milestone for her. My blessed ass can sit there and wait with a smile on my face.
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Rousted from bed at 7 AM after oversleeping, Ashley Pond threw on Tommy Hilfiger jeans, a spaghetti-strap shirt and a sweatshirt. Yelling, “Bye, mom, I love you,” she dashed out the door of their Oregon City apartment to walk a quarter mile to the bus stop. It would be late afternoon before her mother realized that Ashley, a 12-year-old seventh grader, never made it to school.
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Two months later, on March 8, Miranda Gaddis, 13, another seventh grader who lived in the same apartment complex, hurried to get ready for school. Tossing on rhinestone jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, she exchanged “love ya’s,” with her mother before heading to the bus stop. She never got there. Somehow, just like Ashley, on an ordinary morning in broad daylight, within 500 yards of her home, Miranda Gaddis vanished.
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