Exiting bus passengers are pedestrians. There’s a reason why school buses put out their own stop sign when they’re stopped. If you’re coming up on a stopped bus you don’t blow by it, you proceed with extreme caution. I don’t understand why this is in the slightest dispute.
Significant damage can occur at speeds below 10mph. Todays vehicles have crumple zones that fold up the metal around the frame rather than pushing inward towards the passengers.
What exactly are you ticketing the car driver for? For not doing something someone thought they were going to do? For excessive speed based on the opinion of a nonexpert? Unless there are measurable skid marks how do I prove that?
The OP doesn’t give enough detail about the intersection and controls. But as written only the bus driver gets cited.
If there were cameras proving the bus drivers observations, he probably would still get cited.
I could see no tickets issued and letting the insurance companies sort it out.
The hypothetical is that the motor coach driver was making predictions of the future and intentionally caused an accident based on those possibly questionable predictions. Presuming that a pedestrian with a motor coach honking loudly would not look in that direction before further stepping out into a lane or would not be able to see around a motor coach stopped 15 feet away from the stop line. From the description the motor coach driver caused a collision at least 20 feet from the crosswalk.
The most the car driver could be pegged with possibly driving too fast for conditions if they admit that they were not slowing down already before the coach shoved itself in front of them several car lengths before the intersection. The coach driver though?
This is not swerving to avoid hitting someone who ran out in front of you.
School buses put a stop sign because kids run into the street like crazy. If you had to slow down for every stopped bus in a major city you would never get anywhere.
And not just autos.
Is that going to be a train killing a person or a dog?? I saw two seconds and closed the video before anything happened. If so, maybe report your own post and ask a moderator to post some kind of warning for disturbing content?
As to the OP, pkbites, who is or was a police officer, really provided the FQ answer. The bus driver gets a ticket.
Plenty of grownups run into the street like crazy too.
I’ve lived, worked and driven plenty through a major city and if I’m passing a stopped bus on the left you bet I would definitely slow and proceed past it with caution. It’s not like you’re encountering a stopped bus every 20 yards or something on the street.
Please, give me a heads-up if you’re going to be driving anytime in SE Michigan 
Where do you live? Where I am (DC Metro) there are at least as many that don’t have one (or just have one of those yellow blinky lights which don’t do anything in practice or in theory) as do
No, it’s a NZ safety video showing near misses.
OK, whew. I’ll watch it.
So it seems much more justified than that. If you swerve out of your lane because someone ran out in front of you, you are at least partially at fault as you weren’t driving slowly enough and/or paying attention to your surroundings enough to stop in time (depending on the exact circumstances, if someone jumps out of a bush exactly as you are about to pass it, vs someone running out further down the block and you don’t notice)
In this case the bus driver is not at fault at all (morally speaking IMO, regardless of what the law says), he’s stopped correctly and moved out of his lane, putting themselves at risk, to stop someone driving irresponsibly from hitting a mother an child.
Believe me, the misses are harrowing enough. They put up a near-miss marker with a QRC linked to the video at that spot.
A few months ago Virtual Railfan’s cameras caught a pedestrian-train fatality in Elkhart. In order to aid the investigation they posted a non-public YouTube video of the recording, giving the link to the investigators. It wasn’t even shared with us subscribers – not that I looked – but YT yanked the whole channel for a TOS violation. It was down for about 12 hours before the appeak went through.
Man, are they ever!
Here in NJ, people regularly commit suicide by jumping in front of the train. I’ve spoken to some conductors about that – they say that, many times, the engineer can’t ever go back to work. Those people are essentially giving someone else a gun and forcing that person to shoot them. Horrific and traumatizing.
On some of the urban roads I drive on, you pretty much DO encounter a stopped bus every 20 yards. Or, to be more precise, if you don’t pass the bus, you will have to stop for it every other street corner, and street corners aren’t very far apart. So yeah, everyone passes the buses, and all the people on the buses know that. And anyway, the roads with buses don’t just have crosswalks, the intersections all have traffic lights and pedestrians are theoretically supposed to wait for a green light. They aren’t going to be ticketed if they jaywalk, but everyone knows they don’t have right of way.
I work in insurance, and I’ve spent some time looking at traffic liability law. There’s not enough detail here for me to know for sure (and the details of the laws vary more than you might think by jurisdiction, too) but in general, if you break the driving laws to prevent someone from being killed, you are still liable for breaking the driving laws. And if the other party got away scott free, without having caused damage based on your action, they got lucky.
In this case, because the car hit the bus, it might also be cited, but it would depend on the details and the jurisdiction.
As the bus driver, I’d still do it. It’s worth getting ticketed for a minor driving violation to prevent a death.
The OP specified that everyone told the truth about what they did/were doing. So presumably, if the car driver never saw or considered the pedestrian, and intended to pass the bus at speed, they said so. That’s the proof. And again, getting a ticket doesn’t mean being found guilty if it’s contested.
As for the charge for the car driver, it would at the least be failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk I presume.
The car driver could tell the truth and still not admit to anything illegal:
“I was approaching the intersection, I saw a stopped bus. ((Doesn’t mention the pedestrian he couldn’t see)). As I got close to the intersection the bus lurched over in front of me out of the blue and I couldn’t stop before hitting the bus. Never even reached the intersection because the bus cut me off”.
The bus driver intentionally caused a vehicle accident to avoid a pedestrian accident… noble sure, but they still caused the car crash. And the car driver is still entitled to whatever protections/compensation come from getting intentionally damaged by another driver.
Incidentally I was in a similar situation years ago; stopped for a pedestrian at an otherwise uncontrolled intersection (meaning cars coming up from behind in the adjacent lane wouldn’t see any reason to stop… it looked like I was making an unsignalled turn). Due to the timing of the pedestrian/other car’s approach and the angles neither could see each other but I could see both about to collide at a 90 degree angle right in front of me. Luckily they did see each other at the last second and the car screeched to a halt while to pedestrian jumped back in horror.
I didn’t have time to do anything but have since thought… would it have been an idea for me to gently roll into the pedestrian with my car and bump them to stop them from proceeding across and getting smoked by a speeding car? Maybe knock them down with a bruised shin? Even if that worked I think I’d be in big trouble for intentionally hitting a pedestrian.
You are responsible. You changed lanes without yielding to traffic already in the lane. You may be convinced that you saved the woman and the baby and you should get off but you don’t know. The car driver may have stopped in time. The woman may have heard the car coming and stopped before entering the car’s traffic lane.
If I’m a cop in that case, and I have the discretion to not issue a ticket, I probably wouldn’t give you one. But I wouldn’t give one to the car driver either. If I had to give a ticket to someone, it would be you. Your statements admit to failure to yield while changing lanes, which caused a collision.
I disagree. The car hit the bus before the intersection. There is always some speed at which stopping before crossing the intersection was possible but stopping before hitting the bus wasn’t. My hunch is that most cars sold today can stop from 30 mph in much less than the length of a bus.
Don’t fight the hypothetical! If the bus were just a few feet back from the stop line, there might be some room to maneuver the bus this way.
The car certainly stopped before the intersection. The bus made sure of that. You may not think that counts but you can’t cite someone because they didn’t run a red light.
I didn’t say I stop every time when passing a stopped bus immediately to its left, just slow down a little and proceed with caution. Even if I wouldn’t be at fault for running over a jaywalking pedestrian exiting the bus, it would still kind of ruin my day, and I’d prefer to avoid it.
But I’m getting away from the OP’s hypotheticai, which was if a bus is stopped at an intersection, with a mother pushing her baby in a carriage crossing, and the bus driver sees a car coming up on his left that does not look like it’s going to stop, so he moves into the left lane to block the car and it crashes into the bus, who gets the ticket?’
As has been pointed out, the OP does not give a lot of specifics in their scenario, but let’s take as a given a bus stopped in the right hand lane at an intersection that either has a stop sign or a traffic light, with a mom & baby crossing, and the bus driver sees a car approaching on the left that looks like it’s not going to stop. The bus driver has just enough separation between it and the mom & baby to be able to just pull into the left lane enough to stop the car from hitting the mom and baby, crashing into the front side of the bus instead. A cop comes on the scene and asks what happened.
Car driver: I was trying to pass the bus on the left when the moron made a sudden lane change! I couldn’t stop and crashed into him.
Bus driver: I was stopped at this intersection with a mother and her baby crossing, and I saw in my side mirror the car approaching at a rate of speed that looked like it was not intending to stop, and might hit the mother and baby. So I made the call to move into the left lane to prevent that.
Cop (to car driver): were you intending to stop at the intersection, according to state law? It certainly doesn’t look like it.
Car driver: Uhhh…
I think there would be plenty of evidence that the driver was not planning to stop: extensive damage to the bus near the front, and probably skid marks as well where the driver finally tried to stop too late, going too fast, just a few feet from the intersection. If the driver had been intending to stop, it would not have hit the bus. And yes, if there was camera evidence or the mother stuck around to back up the bus driver I’d think that would seal the deal against the car driver. I find it hard to believe, in that scenario, that the cop would just issue a ticket to the bus driver for ‘improper lane change’, let the car driver off scot-free, and be done with it. Yet that seems to be more or less the prevailing opinion.
I usually stay away from posts about hypothetical situations; now I remember why 
The bus driver moved over into the travel lane of the car and caused the accident.
Morals and good intentions aside, moving into the lane of travel for the car is the cause. Look to the action that caused the event, and that was the bus moving over into the next lane of travel. Future events that may have occurred have no bearing on the event.