Bus crash in NYC spotlights cut-rate companies, problems

Associated Press

NEW YORK

Cut-rate bus companies. Driver fatigue. And the need for safer windows and roofs. The New York bus crash that killed 15 people on their way home from a casino has focused renewed attention on problems federal safety investigators have been warning about for years.

The cause of Saturday’s wreck is still under investigation; authorities called the driver in for questioning Tuesday. Officials said this much was clear already: Because of past offenses, his driving privileges had been suspended, and he shouldn’t even have been behind the wheel.

The National Transportation Safety Board is studying the crash to see whether new safety technologies that are available, but not required, might have made a difference.

For example, there are collision-warning systems that alert drivers to obstacles in their paths and tell them when they are swerving from their lanes. The agency also has urged the U.S. Transportation Department to require that bus roofs be strengthened so that they aren’t sheared off, as happened to the New York bus when it hit a signpost. Also, a Senate bill that was reintroduced this year would require anti-ejection glazing windows to prevent passengers from being easily thrown out of a bus.

It’s too early to know whether any of the safety recommendations would have made a difference. But the board has given the Transportation Department failing grades for its slow progress in implementing some recommendations, some of which date back more than a decade.

The bus ran off the road along Interstate 95 in the Bronx as it was returning to New York’s Chinatown from an overnight trip to a Connecticut casino. In a similar accident Monday night on I-95, a bus that had left Chinatown for Philadelphia crashed in East Brunswick, N.J., killing the driver and a passenger.

The buses were among scores that line up in Chinatown each day for bargain-price trips to casinos and elsewhere. They offer cut-rate fares — gamblers can pay $12 round-trip from Chinatown to the Mohegan Sun in Connecticut, and get a $60 bonus at the casino.

Federal regulators have long recognized the dangers of fly-by-night bus companies that skimp on safety and skirt the regulations.