How we wish the Tea Partiers would get on the bus, instead of trying to wreck it. There’s nothing that this country needs more than popular concern for effective regulation. But when you consider the regulatory baackground (or lack of it) behind last weekend’s casino bus disaster, it’s hard not to share the TP’s cynicism about government.

Federal guidelines limit passenger-bus drivers to 10 hours behind the wheel, within a 15-hour work day, and bus carriers face a fine if violations are discovered. But the hours, recorded in a handwritten logbook, are easily falsified, and even outstanding violations are often ignored: World Wide Travel, the operator whose bus crashed in the Bronx, had been cited several times by regulators for problems with its logs.

At Foxwoods on Monday, a driver for World Wide Travel was preparing for a nap in his bus’s front passenger row. The driver had arranged a blanket and several small pillows atop a knapsack; later, he opened an overhead compartment to reveal a stash of blankets. “You see my bed?” he said with a smile.

[snip]

Federal law is nearly silent on qualifications for the job: for the most part, anyone with a state-issued commercial driver’s license is eligible. Carriers are expected to obtain medical certificates from their drivers and occasionally test for drug and alcohol use; a spokesman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the industry’s regulator, said that the responsibility for administering those tests fell to the business, not the state, and that violators could face fines.

Some skeptics wonder if discount bus companies, which are rarely unionized and have only a few employees, end up with castoffs from more reputable places.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 10:30 am.