Bus Driver Driving Records

There is a Louisiana law on the books that allows a driver, once every two years, to keep a driving offense off their record if they plead no contest, pay a fine and attend a driving class. This is helpful for people to keep their insurance rates low, however, The Lafayette Parish School System relies on driving records when evaluating their bus drivers, and if the offense isn't listed, they don't know it exists. This prompted the Daily Advertiser to investigate and they came up with some pretty interesting statistics.

They found that the driving records of the 308 bus drivers in their personal vehicles and buses show:

• At least 144 drivers, or 47 percent, have at least one driving or criminal offense.
• Eight were cited for operating a vehicle while intoxicated, three in the past 10 years.
• At least 41 were ticketed for wrecks involving heavy damages.
• At least 24 have three or more citations.
• One driver was cited in five wrecks.
• At least 51 were ticketed for careless operation, 18 of them involving heavy damage to a vehicle.

In addition, one driver was ticketed twice for having no child restraints in her personal car and several more were faulted for rear-ending other buses and passing stopped school bus

Here's the full story on what they found

And the story that prompted the investigation.


Photo by: msmail