Danger on School Buses

Sightseeing bus drivers are again found to be careless for school students’ during field trips. They drive bumper-to-bumper, do not observe the proper distance between vehicles and ignore safe driving guidelines. This leads to massive traffic accidents.

A bus (driver Park Jae-soo 59) heading to Chuncheon from Gapyong ran into a bus head-on (driver Park Hee-young 56) near Wondaesungli bus stop on National Road 46 around 11:30 a.m. on April 11. Third grade students of Namincheon Girls’ Middle School were on these buses, heading to Kangchon, Kangwon Province.

A total of fifty-four students including Yoon Narae (15) were injured, some seriously, and transported to three hospitals nearby. They are currently being treated. The police are investigating the cause of the accident, supposing the buses collided with each other when the cross-country bus stopped.

A total of four buses collided with each other on the Seoul-Busan highway around 2:35 p.m. on April 9. A total of 123 sixth grade students from Incheon Chungchun Elementary School were on the buses and twenty students including Kim A-rum (13) were injured. They were on their way to Kyong-ju.

The cause of this accident was that the last bus did not notice that the buses in front of it stopped because of construction work ahead.

“Bus drivers for school field trips still ignore the proper distance between cars to keep other vehicles from cutting in between the buses,” an official from the Kyoungbuk Police said. “If the accident site had been on a downward slope, not a straight road, the damage would have been much more serious.” The buses were found to have been only a few meters apart.

“It is a rule for buses on field trips to be escorted by police, but this school did not even make the request,” he added.

The Ministry of Education directed that buses for school field trips be escorted after 18 students were killed and 97 students injured in an accident in 2000. There have been a total of 10 vehicle accidents on the Chupungryong-Kyongju section of the Seoul-Busan highway since the start of the year.

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