I have to be honest… I hate the whole back to school time.  Besides the perhaps not so obvious reasons… it unleashes that which I despise most on the streets of the city…

The yellow school bus.

These “Cheese Buses”, as we call them, are a a major contributing factor to the congestion levels of the city.  They stop in the middle of the block, double park, hold up traffic, and most of the time have a complete disregard for other motorists.  I’ll be honest on the fact that pretty much 90% of the accidents I’ve ever responded to that involved a bus actually involved a school bus as opposed to a city or private bus.  It can be pretty scary.

The sad part is that its really a long process to be eligible to drive a school bus.  There’s a commercial driver’s license, a 19A certification, something like 8 hours of class to attend, a physical endurance test, and believe it or not there is actually a pretty in depth background check accompanied with fingerprinting.  All of these are actually positive things considering we are trusting them with our children.  There just seems to be one glaring ommission.

The driving test.

A test on common sense would be nice… but let’s face it… the kids need to get to school somehow and since common sense seems to be in short supply… I guess we’ll take what we can get.  Still, I really wish they would give these people a driving test.

Or give the kids crash helmets.

Something is better than nothing.