Brickbat: Wrong Way

A substitute school van driver for Pennsylvania's West Shore School District got lost multiple times while taking kids home—including a 7-year-old boy whose mom thought he was missing and called 911 in a panic when she was unable to reach anyone at the school. The trouble started when the driver put the right address, but the wrong city, into his GPS, and things got worse when heavy traffic on I-83 forced a detour onto back roads and further confused him. The driver called his supervisor at 4:20 and 4:45 p.m. to say he was lost, and staff from the transportation company Rohrer and the district tried to guide him over speakerphone, but after 5 p.m., they told him to pull over at a local business, where families were then told to go pick up their kids.

Comments

[Adans smith]

must be a trans man and still can't drive.

[Vernon Depner]

Because of GPS, people no longer have any idea where they are. Time to start teaching map reading and local geography in schools.

[mad.casual]

Just think, with an autonomous bus that someone accidentally pushed the wrong location into, we wouldn't have anyone but the algorithm to blame!

[jimc5499]

A few years ago a woman was following her GPS at night in a snowstorm. The GPS actually directed her out on to a frozen lake. Her car broke through the ice and she drown. There had been a road there before the lake was created. A section of the road led down to the water. There was a barricade there, but, some people moved it to pull their shanty's on to the lake to ice fish.

[AT]

Let me guess. Pakistani illegal with a California-issued CDL.

[Fist of Etiquette]

When I was a kid we walked home in the wrong direction uphill both ways.

[diver64]

What, no snow? Poozer.

[Chumby]

Close all education facilities funded from taxes.

[diver64]

Every school district I'm aware of has their drivers train on the routes before school is in session for the year to memorize not only the routes but the stops.

[mad.casual]

Out of curiosity, how many school district busing policies are you keeping tabs on?

Locally, in my corner of the Insurrectionist Layer Cake State, the bussing companies are generally "privately owned" and contract out to various school districts and other causes at various times for various reasons. I know the nearest one trains daily routes before the school year begins, but if there's (e.g.) an away football game the night before and a driver can't run their morning shift for lack of sleep or whatever reason, their replacement might not have not have ever run the specific route before. This has been the case for almost 20 yrs.

I have no idea if they train people to punch routes into the GPS correctly. Even if they did, I would imagine errors still happen.

[Longtobefree]

You do remember that democrats run Pennsylvania, right?