Limits

Limit. 

Noun. A prescribed maximum or minimum. Websters.

Not a difficult concept.

Except, perhaps, when used as in the photo above.

Well, folks, that's meant as a maximum. Definitely not a minimum.

No matter what a lot of drivers believe.

Okay, the numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that in 2009 there were 10,951 speeding-related traffic fatalities in the U.S. That's roughly comparable to gun-related homicides (CDC reported 11,078 of those in 2010).

We've heard a lot about guns and homicide, but the tragic reality is that speeding is just as deadly. That means trying to get to that next red light a little quicker. Using the gas pedal to express your frustration with the complexities of life. Or your failure to deal sensibly with schedules. Or voicing your contempt for some other driver by leaving them in the dust. Or doing the same thing, to stroke your ego.

Speed kills. It really does. Often. Much too often.

More numbers. Traveling one mile at 45 mph takes 1 minute, 20 seconds. The same distance at 55 takes about 14 seconds less. Fourteen seconds - worth raising the risk of killing someone?

Even over a longer distance, is the difference that important? A hundred miles at 60 mph takes an hour and forty minutes. Seventy saves less than 15 minutes. That's maybe the time spent dawdling over a cup of coffee, knowing the clock is running but pretending it's not. Is the life of that stranger in that Chevy, or maybe your lovely spouse sitting next to you, worth that little time management faux pas?

How much time is your life worth? Your spouse's? Your kids? Somebody else's kids? Believe, me, they're all worth a lot more than the few seconds you're trying to shave.

Driving a school bus, I see it all the time. Drivers rushing to get around me, and up to that red light moments before I do. Racing to get ahead of me before the road narrows to two lanes. Or running up behind me, flashing their lights to speed me up. (Sorry, a single speeding ticket would cost me my job, to say nothing about how speeding might endanger "my" kids.) Even cursing me for going "too slow" (yes, it's happened).

Slow down, you move too fast. You got to make the morning last.

That, and the lives of the people you endanger. Including your own.

Oh yeah, and you'll also be saving money, a lot of money -- on the tickets, on your auto insurance, on taking the taxi after your license gets suspended. Maybe on repair costs, medical bills, lawyers' fees and court judgments, too. Speeding can cost you a lot, an awful lot, and I'm not talking just money.

Besides, do the limit and driving becomes so much easier, 'cause all the fools passing you by invariably leave the lane empty in front of you. And you can listen to your music in peace.



P.S. One more set of numbers. In 2010, 197,616 drivers got speeding tickets in Virginia. That's three and a third per cent of all Virginia drivers. Why chance being one of them? Especially when running all the risks won't gain you much?

Robbed by the bulldozer

I live in an area now experiencing the emergence of Brood II of the mid-Atlantic's famed 17 year cicadas.

Or, to be more accurate, I live in an area that should be experiencing Brood II's emergence.

I hear them in the forest behind the school where I park my bus. I hear them in what's left of the forest near the local elementary school. I suspect I'll hear them if I go hiking this weekend. But I'm not hearing them where I live.

Why not? That's a good question, but I'll be it has a lot to do with the fact that this community (if I dare use that term) didn't exist in 1996, when they last emerged. This area was mostly farm and forest back then, but nearly all the farms are gone, and only vestiges of the forests remain. All else has been churned up by bulldozers, transformed into a landscape of cookie-cutter townhouses interspersed with variations on the McMansion theme.

Did the bulldozers wreak so much havoc that they annihilated Brood II? That's my guess.

Sad. I miss the beady-eyed little critters. Along with their incessant song. And the farms and fields that have disappeared, too.

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Update: A wayward cicada flew into an open window on my bus and landed near a first grader. She wavered between disgust and fascination, so I leaned overand asked her age. "Six." I mentioned that the next time she saw one, she'd be 23. She looked puzzled, as though the very idea of ever being that old was utterly incomprehensible. To me, that's fundamental to the sense of wonder these insects engender; they stretch our sense of time beyond the constraints of the ordinary.

Update: The photo above replaces the "borrowed" original; this one was shot in the forest remnant bordering the lot where I park my bus.

The best of it, and otherwise

School's nearly over, and a lot of elementary kids mark the fact by giving their teaches and their bus drivers little gifts. On my morning run today, one gave me a little cup full of candy, and a note:

Thank you for driving me to and from school safely! You are the best bus driver ever!

Makes you feel good, y'know?

As for the otherwise .... Substituted on a kindergarten run for a colleague who was out today. Looked back in the mirror to see two boys rolling on the floor, one holding the other in a hammer lock. Ugh. Separated them and asked them if their teacher lets them do that in class.

     "No."

Does their bus driver let them do that on the bus?

     "No"

Then why were they doing it now?

     No answer.

Assigned them seats some distance from the other, but a couple of minutes later they were in the same seat, punching each other.

Sigh.

So sometimes I wonder why I ever step into that big yellow box. But that "best bus driver ever" note, and kids like the one who wrote it, answer the question ....

Panic in a big yellow box

Stink bugs. All over the place.

Or at least, all over the bus.

Soaking in the rays on the sun-warmed yellow metal. On the windows, on the door, on the ceiling, crawling across the seat backs.

Add several dozen kids, the inevitable proportion of them still harboring a child's alarm at anything creepy-crawly, the predictable number unable to inhibit their excited reflexes for even a moment.

Bedlam in the bus.

Get on the mike, explain that they're harmless, that they don't attack people, that they don't bite. Or sweep sand off the beach - it's about as effective.

So just shrug your shoulders and laugh ... and hope they don't squish any of them.

For the record, they're harmless to humans, but they are pests. They're a recently introduced species (probably in the 1990s or 1980s) from Asia, and they are a problem for farmers. But really, they're not a danger to school kids on a bus!


(For all you ever wanted to know about stink bugs - more properly, Brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys), go to this web page from Penn State, which is also the source of the lovely portrait above.)

It's a fragile thing

I saw a dead man today. Splayed out on the roof of the car that killed him. 

Two minutes earlier, he had been a living, thinking, feeling being, probably full of plans and hopes and concerns for his future -- maybe with a lot on his mind, or maybe just looking forward to getting home from work and relaxing. In the blink of an eye, all of that died with him. gone, in a blinding flash.

Two minutes earlier, the person who killed him may well have been heading home after a day's labor, too, perhaps thinking about plans for the evening, perhaps trying to cut a few seconds of the commute, perhaps just enjoying a song on the stereo. But now, he or she will spend the rest of their life reliving that moment, wondering why they hadn't been paying a little more attention, hadn't been a mite more patient, a tad more cautious. Living with it, living with the knowledge that willingly or not, culpably or not, they had killed another human being, snuffed out another life of possibilities and dreams. And wishing - wishing passionately, desperately -- that they could have that moment back, to do it right, to make it right, knowing they cannot, and knowing they will always live with the regret, the guilt, the remorse.

I didn't see it happen; I arrived a tiny bit later, to see the dead man lying in a position no living person would hold yet looking strangely peaceful and quiet in his deathly repose; lying alone while good citizens diligently directed traffic and talked into their cell phones (to the police? their friends?) while others stood by and took photographs ("my, what an interesting story to share over the dinner table!") or ran about, trying to help but doing nothing. The dead, lying alone, untended, as though none could summon the courage to approach something that moments ago had been so much like themselves but was now forever different, forever foreign, forever, until they themselves reach their own unimagined and unimaginable terminus.  

In a flash of a moment, it all changes. A moment that should have been unremarkable, and even was, for people going about their daily business only a few hundred yards away. A moment that should have been unremarkable but wasn't, a moment that utterly changed forever those two people, ruining the life of each, one instantly, and one over interminable moments that will haunt his or her existence to the end of time.

Life is such a fragile thing. Beautiful, and precious, but terribly fragile. We hold it in the cup of our hand, all our lives, in everything we do. 

It would be well if we held it with care, always mindful of our awful responsibility.

Ooh baby, ooh baby

We school bus drivers use the radio to keep in touch. It's pretty amateurish; one hears "10-4" used far more often and far less precisely than one should, but it is useful.

And sometimes funny.

Mostly it's for supervisors and the garage passing along information. Or central dispatch looking for drivers who can fill in for other drivers whose buses have broken down, or who are unexpectedly caught in a traffic jam, or who belatedly called in sick. Or drivers who have significant problems to report.

"Base, this is bus 165; my air pressure is falling so I've parked on the side of Edgewater near ...."

"Base, this is bus 279; I've got a Kindergartner whose parent wasn't there so I''m returning him to his school ...."

"Bus 82, this is the garage. Please bring your bus in for servicing before 2:00 p.m. on Tuesday."

"This is base; can any driver second load this p.m. out of Pinebrook elementary for bus 55?

Alas, there are inevitably those drivers who love the sound of their voices who clutter the airwaves with messages we really don't need to hear. "This is bus 497: there's a styrofoam cup on in the right lane of the County Parkway; use extreme caution." Okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by much. I'm often amused (and sometimes nettled) by the superfluous messages that blast though our squawk boxes.

Still, it's a useful tool, the only way to tie together a herd of several hundred yellow boxes roaming around the county's neighborhoods.

But the real joy is that some of the transmissions are just plain funny. My favorite which came deliciously with no warning and no attribution: "I love you, but you still have to move."

Bus 1, Car 0

Driving these big yellow boxes, one thinks about Sir Isaac Newton a lot. When accelerating, when stopping, when turning, when approaching kids on the sidewalk. You know, mass and inertia, objects in motion and all of that. Most of all, though, one thinks about 17 tons versus one ton. As in, collision.

Luckily, although the thought of it is constantly with them, most school bus drivers never have to face the reality. The opportunity is out there, to be sure; all bus drivers have their share of stories about near misses, of car drivers somehow failing to see them ("we're big, we're yellow, and we have lights all over us; what's hard to see?") and pulling out in front of them, or changing lanes into them, or running stop signs or traffic lights. And all too often, the cars' drivers are on their cell phones. (How else to understand overlooking our behemoths?) Scary stories, but thankfully mostly near misses.

A week ago Tuesday the worry became my reality.

I was driving on a 4 lane divided expressway.  I had just picked up the last of my middle-schoolers and was headed for their school to let them off. I had turned on to the expressway only a quarter mile earlier, so I was still accelerating, probably doing 30-35 m.p.h. on my way up to the 45 m.p.h. limit. As I approached a minor intersecting two lane residential street, I saw a car decelerating towards the stop sign, i.e., behaving in way that looked pretty ordinary, but then it started accelerating into Parkway, and directly into my path!  I swerved to the left, thinking at the time that the other driver still had time to stop if they had my now-vacated right lane to use.  (Fortunately I knew the left lane was empty, so swerving was a relatively safe option.)  Instead, the car kept coming and plowed into the middle of my bus's side. 

It was amazing how quickly it all happened.

I heard the crash more than felt it, and fortunately my control of the bus was never in doubt.

I immediately pulled back into the right lane and parked against the curb. My first thought was for the kids, of course, but they all seemed to be okay.  Still, I asked, and they all said they were okay.  So then I radioed our central dispatch (which alerts police and rescue), and set out my reflective triangles.  Before I finished that task, the police and an ambulance arrived (we were only a quarter mile from their shared regional headquarters). 

It was only then that I looked at the car that hit us.  It was about 150 yards behind me, and its entire front end had been destroyed -- utterly destroyed; even the engine was damaged and deformed.  (Fortunately, the passenger compartment was perfectly intact, and the driver's only injury came from the airbag.)  The car was a fairly new Nissan Versa.

By comparison, the bus suffered little damage.  One tire and its rim were ruined, and there was sheet metal damage along the side, but all of that was below the level of the main frame and there was no structural damage at all.  Once the wheel and tire were changed, it drove normally.

Score: Bus 1, car 0!

I really don't think I could have done anything differently.  There was too little time to stop, or even decelerate significantly; maneuvering to avoid was the only real option. Had I not swerved, I might have run into the side of the car, especially if I had tried braking, in which case there would have been a good chance that I would have killed the driver, or at least seriously injured her.

There were no skid marks from the car.  Frankly, I don't think the driver saw me until the bus flashed in front of her.  My guess - and it's only that, a guess - is that she was on a cell phone.  Like I said, she was coming from a minor residential street while I was on a major one - it's the sort of intersection where a driver on the lesser road just naturally expects to stop for the fast-moving, heavy traffic of the major road.  If she wasn't distracted by a cell phone, it's hard to imagine why she did what she did.  I mean, it's not as if a 40 foot long, 17 ton brick-shaped yellow box with lights on is hard to miss!

As for my reaction ... some of the other bus drivers asked me later if I was OK (in the sense of not being so rattled I couldn't work, or some such) but it didn't affect me much at all, really.

It all happened faster than I could react emotionally (e.g., I was initially too busy to feel anything, and the adrenaline hit well after the fact). After it was over and I thought back on it, I couldn't see anything I did that I wished I could have done differently, nor did I have any regrets about what I did do.  So it wasn't upsetting or scary or anything like that. 

It did help, I think, that when the police and my boss arrived on the scene and surveyed the scene, they were very matter-of-fact and didn't criticize or comment on my actions directly or indirectly at all.

It made for an interesting morning. Besides, one student aboard told me she didn't really want to go to first period math anyway.

Citizen drivers

A couple of the aspects of school bus driving I like most are the drivers' implicit assumption of equality, and the utter lack of competitiveness between them. I've never seen anything like it, anywhere else.

We're a diverse lot. Broadly speaking, we fall into two groups: those who started driving school buses before the lesser depression hit in 2007, and those who came after. The first group is primarily made up of people - mostly women - from blue collar families or the lower rungs of the service sector. By in large, they never went beyond high school, and most of them lived in the county when it was still rural, and both wages and land prices were low. Their number includes both whites and African-Americans.

It's a little more complicated for the newer drivers. Many of us are victims of the recession, mostly middle-aged, who lost our jobs as the economy plunged; this group tends to be college educated, and a lot of us have advanced degrees. Many of us were employed in professional careers; there are a lot of former IT professionals among us and a lot of building contractors, but many other fields are represented too, from graphic design to retail management. Then, too, a lot of the newer drivers are "new wave" immigrants, from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and both South and Southeast Asia ... and many of them are well educated too, having left behind various professional careers when the emigrated.

There's certainly a rich mixture of accents over our radio!

What's more interesting, and profoundly satisfying, is that I've never - never - seem or heard anything to suggest that any one of us harbors any dislike or distrust or any other evidence of group-related, ethnic, national or racial bias against anybody else. Clearly, we see ourselves as a community of equals, involved in and dedicated - yes, truly dedicated - to the same goal.

That respect for each other leads directly to our cooperative approach to our work. During those times when we're sitting idle, waiting for the students to be released to our buses, we gather together just as bus drivers, chatting about the usual inanities of life or discussing work-related issues. We live the same lives, at least at work, doing the same job, facing the same problems, employed in an experience more completely shared than I've seen in any other working environment. When one of us encounters a problem - say, a traffic obstruction, or a mechanical problem, or an sudden illness, or any other personal or work-related problem - we all pitch in ... and we do it not for money or some other tangible reward, but just to help out.

I should add that the lack of bias spills over to our attitude about the kids we carry: they, too, are a diverse lot, but although I've head many a driver complain about poor student behavior, I've never heard any such complaint tinged with a whiff of bigotry.

I'm finding that school bus drivers are a great community of people, and I'm proud to be among them. And happy, too.

DWT

Waiting for a left turn signal, heading north waiting to turn west. Signal turns; I've got the green arrow. Same for the line of cars headed in the opposite direction.

Car southbound jumps forward as I begin my turn; my guess is that the driver saw the cars to his immediate left starting up so he hit the gas too. Problem, of course, is that he still had the red, and my big yellow box was starting to turn across his bow.

I hit the brakes hard. Also hit the horn hard. The guy stops, fully in the intersection. I look at him, but he's not looking at me or around at the rest of the traffic. No, his attention immediately returns to the electronic device cradled in his lap. Texting.

Personally, I'd rather he'd been drinking a beer. Then at least other drinkers might think, "There but for the grace of God ...." But I doubt that many cell phone users would see the connection, even if the safety stats are alarmingly similar.

Brrrrr

I like school bus driving. I really do. Okay, the pay is lousy, but I like the job.

But there is one aspect of it I hadn't foreseen, and which at times makes that old office job seem awfully inviting: cold.

Cold, as in 14 degrees Fahrenheit.*

Which is what it was the other morning, when I arrived to prepare my bus for the day's schedule. Of course, that was before dawn, but dawn didn't bring much help; the thermometer reached only to 28 by the afternoon.

Worse, the heater in my bus is anemic. Running full blast, it didn't raise the inside temperature enough to make me think I could remove my gloves until the final run of the day, and it didn't feel even vaguely comfortable until I had dropped off my last kid for the day. And no, I never removed my parka. I was chilly all day. Very chilly.

I know, it could be worse. I could be our roving mechanic, working all day outside (and often under buses trying to thaw out frozen brake lines, or swinging a wrench to replace a frozen stop sign actuator). Or have any one of a number of other jobs that require one to be outdoors all day in all types of weather.

On the other hand, I could be in an office, where cold days mean 72 F (and hot, 78). Has a nice sound to it, y'know? Granted, back then I worked for a malevolent tyrant whose only saving grace was blinding incompetence. But I never came home chilled to the bone ....


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* Yes, I could say -10 Celsius, and Celsius really does makes a lot more sense. But using a positive number makes it sound warmer, or at least not quite so cold. And 28 definitely sounds better than minus two. The time to go metric is the summer, when 40 Celsius sounds so much better than 104.

Cell phones and driving

On December 13 the National Traffic Safety Board came out with a recommendation that all states "Ban the nonemergency use of portable electronic devices" in response to its study of a fatal traffic accident caused by a driver texting while in heavy traffic. Although the recommendation deals with all portable electronic devices, most of the media attention has pertained to its impact on cell phone usage by drivers. The recommendation has gotten a lot of press. It's also generated a lot of opposition, much of which, it seems to me, raises the red herring of other distractions to drivers.

It seems to me that the big difference is the context of the distraction. Whether it's eating or listening to the radio or carrying on a conversation with a passenger, the context of the distracting event remains the car and the traffic conditions in which it is operating. The driver and any passenger are aware of what's happening on the road, and automatically pause while the driver deals with anything requiring a reaction.

It's happened to me countless times. A conversation will halt while I deal with the suddenly changed traffic condition, and then resumes without a break when the situation permits. Or I disregard the piece of fruit or sandwich I had been considering a moment before. Or the radio is ignored until I am able to listen again. The normal sort of distracting event hardly interferes with my attention to the road at all, or with my ability to handle the car.

A phone call is different. The other person on the call has no awareness of what's happening in traffic, and indeed may have no awareness that the talkative driver is even driving. So they won't pause if somebody suddenly turns in front of their conversationalist, or the driver needs to check a blind spot while changing lanes. Worse, the driver too easily falls into the trap of concentrating on the phone call, and truly is distracted from the demands of safely driving. How else to explain such egregious lapses of attention, such as one I saw the other day when a driver at a "T" intersection when straight ahead when the light turned green, and plowed into the signal box controlling the intersection's traffic lights?

As a professional driver, I see many, many questionable and dangerous maneuvers, and almost invariably when I look at the drivers, I see that they are holding a cell phone to their ear, or are talking to somebody who isn't in the car with them.

Cell phones are wonderful conveniences. I rely on mine so much I've given up my land line. But they become dangerous when used by drivers. It's as simple as that. There can be no justification for driving while on the phone.

Herons in the 'burbs

Driving a school bus has its little pleasures, which do a lot to grease the wheels. Before "my" elementary school lets out in the afternoon, we drivers stage along a street out in front of the school, waiting for the signal to pull in and pick up our kids.

Adjacent to that street is a small pond which provides its share of those small treasures, even among the signs warning trespassers to not enjoy the view (okay, they actually tell them not to swim, boat, fish or ice skate, but the meaning is clear). It's a little oasis despite the prohibitions, a reminder that there is a world of beauty beyond the commonplace.

Occasionally gracing the pond is a great blue heron, patiently fishing the shallows, largely oblivious of the big yellow boxes parked just beyond the bank. They're my favorite bird, and it's a delight to watch this one stand motionless intently watching the water or slowing wading through the shallows stalking its prey. Watching it, one can readily shake free from the mundanity of the surrounding cookie cutter architecture and appreciate in microcosm the beauty of our remoter estuaries and rivers. Indeed, even in the midst of soulless suburbia, one can find a glimpse of that wildness Thoreau found to be the preservation of the world.

Good for the body, good for the planet

After I got the job driving a school bus and decided I liked it, I moved to be closer to work. Now, if I drive to work, I've got about a 7.1 mile round trip by car ... and since we get an enormous (unpaid!) break in the middle of the day, it's a round trip I usually make twice a day.

But I don't drive my commute; I bike it. Granted, the bike route saves about two miles on the round trip, since I can take a short cut that's not available to drivers. Thanks to that short cut, the elapsed time is about the same. But still, it saves 14 miles of driving every day I hop on the bike.

More to the point, biking puts me in better shape. Which is not an inconsiderable benefit, considering that I'm in training for yet another Grand Canyon hike. (see my other blog, ketches, yaks and hawks.)

But it also saves on gasoline. Assuming I bike both my commutes, morning and afternoon, every day of the week, I'm saving about 70 miles of driving. Which for me, would be about three gallons each week, which is three gallons of irreplaceable gasoline which isn't being pumped out of the ground, and three gallons of gasoline which isn't ending up as greenhouse gas emissions. Not a large amount in the scheme of things, but every bit saved really does help.

It also means I'm saving about ten dollars each week. Which isn't bad news for somebody who is still adjusting to being seriously underemployed.

So it's a win-win-win solution. I commend it to everybody who can find a way to get to work on a bike

Plan B: the big yellow box

I had mentioned that I was laid off in the summer of 2010, and that I wasn't very optimistic about prospects in my profession.

Alas, that proved true, and despite a year of searching I wasn't able to find any position within my field. There weren't that many to begin with, and what there were paid far less than what I had been making. The few interview opportunities I was able to obtain seemed to end the moment I walked into the room, with the unmistakable look of "Oh my god, it's a geezer" spreading across the interviewer's face.

The best chance I had was with a small town library in a remote part of the state, working four full days and two half days each week, for less than half my previous salary and with just two weeks of leave annually. I was grateful for the confidence the interviewer had in me and was impressed by the library, but it was a mistake to have even applied. I suppose I'm stuck in my ways, but taking the job would have meant never seeing my college-age daughter or my very elderly father, save by splitting those two weeks, and never taking a trip just for my own sake. It also would have meant scrimping each and every day, but I knew that was to be my future under the best of possibilities.

So I finally opted for Plan B, in earnest. And landed a job driving a school bus for a suburban county on the outskirts of the metropolitan region. The pay is lousy - about half of that library position that was less than half of my "real" job. But the work is oddly satisfying and generally pleasant, and in many ways I'm far happier at the wheel of my bus than I ever was working where I had been. And I get summers off.

But more on that anon. Suffice it for now just to say that I'm a school bus driver, and consider myself fortunate for that fact.