NTSB: Confusing signs caused Ga. bus crash

Investigators said the 65-year-old driver was partly at fault.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Transportation Safety Board put heavy blame on the Georgia Department of Transportation Tuesday for an Atlanta bus crash last year that killed five college baseball players, saying confusing highway signs were a primary cause.

The board also cited driver error and a lack of safety features such as seat belts as contributing factors, fueling calls for tougher standards on U.S. bus operators.

Investigators said the bus driver in the March 2, 2007, accident thought he was staying in an HOV lane when he drove onto an elevated exit ramp, plowing through a stop sign at highway speed and hurtling from an overpass back onto the interstate below. Five members of Ohio’s Bluffton University baseball team, along with the driver and his wife, were killed. The crash injured another 28 people.

NTSB investigators said Georgia officials changed the initial design of the exit signs after having trouble mounting them. The change deviated from federal guidance on pairing some exit signs together to make them more clear, they said, but it did not amount to a violation of federal regulations, which allow for some exceptions.

NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker called it “an accident that didn’t have to happen.”

No fatalities were reported at the accident site in the 10 years before HOV lanes were introduced in the mid-1990s, but there have been three fatal wrecks in the decade since, the board said.

“Had the appropriate investigation been done at the state level we might not be here today,” Rosenker said.

Georgia DOT had no immediate comment. The agency has previously said it received no complaints about the interchange, although police reports show at least three drivers that had earlier wrecks at the site said they misread signs and did not realize they had left the HOV lane before they crashed.

The state has since improved markings at the site of the crash and elsewhere.

The NTSB recommended Tuesday that the Federal Highway Administration proceed with a proposal announced after the crash to adopt more clear, consistent regulations for similar traffic configurations around the country.

Investigators said the 65-year-old bus driver, Jerome Niemeyer, was partly at fault.

He had a good record and had been driving for only an hour before the early-morning crash, they said. But his medical certificate, which is required by law, was expired, and he had several risk factors for sleep apnea.

The board said the outdated certification was one of many violations it found at the now-defunct bus operator, Executive Coach Luxury Travel Inc., based in Ottawa, Ohio.

Still, they found no evidence that fatigue or other problems contributed to the crash.

Instead, the driver simply “missed what route guidance was available” and didn’t slow down as he came up the exit ramp, despite two signs notifying drivers of a stop ahead, investigator Deborah Bruce said.

The transportation safety board also expressed frustration that federal regulators have not acted on its long-standing recommendations for improved safety features on motorcoaches. The NTSB has recommended seat belts or other passenger restraints such as shatterproof windows and stronger roofs since a 1968 head-on collision involving a Greyhound bus killed 19 passengers near Baker, Calif.

The Transportation Department has not implemented the recommendations, however, and Congress has remained quiet as the bus industry has lobbied heavily against costly new standards.

Industry officials maintain that buses are among the safest forms of travel and that more crash test data is needed before the government takes action.

But parents of the crash victims — several of whom attended Tuesday’s meeting in Washington — have seized on the accident to campaign for tougher regulations.

They are pushing for bipartisan legislation introduced after the wreck by Sens. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, that would force regulators to act. The bill is currently stuck in committee.

John Betts, whose son, David, was killed in the crash, said if the NTSB’s proposals had been adopted, “our sons would be alive today.”

“That’s not a wish. That’s not a fantasy. That’s a fact,” he said. “The apathy has gone on too long. These recommendations were made 40 years ago.”