NTSB wants bus drivers tested for drunkenness

In fairness, if I had to work as a school bus driver, I'd come to work smashed too. I swear it's the only driving job where you are allowed and expected to be distracted. How can you possibly expect to drive safely when you have to turn around and yell at kids every three seconds while operating a massive vehicle?

Also, if bus drivers need to be tested for alcohol, then I think parents should be too. All this shit about "carrying our most precious cargo," but you KNOW plenty of parents have driven their brats around with a BAC higher than zero. Can you imagine the uproar if all parents' vehicles were fitted with ignition interlock devices? It's their God-given right to drive Aschh-le'igheee to clarinet practice after slamming a 12-pack, goddammit!

Also, does the NTSB not think bus drivers who are sloshed won't just have kids blow in the devices in exchange for like a candy bar? Like, "Pretend like you're blowing out birthday candles right into this little thingy for me!" They have a whole bus full of idiots who would happily sell their family's souls for a pack of Pokemon cards.

And oh look at that, it would cost $100 per month for the monitoring system to operate too, on top of the device and installation costs. Gee I wonder who will be paying for that? Don't schools piss and moan every single year about how they don't have the budget for anything? Sooo we're looking at an expense of $900 per year (taking summer break into account, or $1200 a year if they don't cancel the service for summer) per bus.

Don't get me wrong, drunk bus drivers are a little worse than drunk single drivers because if they get into an accident, they stand the chance of injuring a lot more people simply because they are operating massive machines carrying a lot of passengers.

Not saying it's a bad idea to ensure school bus drivers are not impaired. I just find it funny that they are concerned about them being drunk when their driving is already impaired having to yell at students to sit down/leave the other kids alone/stop screaming/etc. You could not fucking pay me enough to drive a school barge, especially not sober.

https://www.wfsb.com/2026/04/24/school-buses-should-all-have-alcohol-tests-avoid-drunken-driving-ntsb-recommends/

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After a school bus rolled on a West Virginia highway two years ago, forcing one boy to have his leg amputated and seriously injuring two other children aboard, police quickly discovered the driver was drunk.

But the National Transportation Safety Board then discovered something even more troubling: School bus drivers driving impaired was not an isolated problem.

That’s why the NTSB on Thursday recommended for the first time that all new school buses be equipped with alcohol detection systems that can disable the bus if they detect the driver might be impaired. Similar systems are already used on school buses in parts of Europe.

“There’s a higher expectation for school bus drivers than many other types of drivers,” (but not for parents, I'm sure) said Kris Poland, deputy director of the NTSB’s Office of Highway Safety. “We expect that the drivers are attentive, not fatigued, not impaired and are driving as safely as possible.”

The agency didn’t estimate the cost of adding the detection systems to buses or say who would foot the bill. The kind of ignition interlock device that people charged with DUIs are routinely required to get costs about $75 to $150 to install and roughly $100 a month to monitor.

Alcohol is linked to one-third of traffic deaths

Federal regulators or states could require the technology, but Congress would have to pass legislation to ensure widespread adoption. The NTSB recommendation focuses on alcohol and not drugs because they determined that was the probable cause of this crash and there aren’t similar tests available for other drugs like marijuana. There also aren’t clear legal standards for exactly how much of other drugs is enough to impair a driver.

It follows a previous recommendation by NTSB that Congress adopted to require alcohol detection systems in all new passenger vehicles. But that rule has yet to be rolled out because it is still caught up in the rulemaking process.

The NTSB has long been concerned about drunken driving because alcohol is a factor in one-third of the roughly 37,000 traffic deaths each year. Investigators struggled to nail down exact stats on how common a problem this is among school bus drivers, but they found enough evidence to convince them that alcohol detection systems are needed.

A report by the news service Stateline.org in 2020 showed at least 118 school bus drivers had been ticketed or arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs over the five previous years, said Meg Sweeny, the primary author of the NTSB report on the West Virginia bus crash.

In that crash, the driver lost control of the bus after hitting a driveway culvert off the right side of a rural road. All 19 children aboard were hurt, but most had only minor injuries. The driver was sentenced last year to up to 110 years in prison.

Data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that 407 school bus drivers were involved in fatal crashes between 2020 and 2024. Only two of those tested positive for alcohol, and only one of them had a blood alcohol level above the legal limit, but those numbers only included fatal crashes so the West Virginia crash and most of the citations and arrests Stateline found wouldn’t be accounted for.

Protecting our ‘precious passengers’

The number of drunken driving cases among bus drivers alarmed even though it remains a small portion of all drivers, Peter Kurdock, who is general counsel for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

“Children going to and from the schoolhouse are America’s most precious passengers,” Kurdock said. “So we should be doing all we can to make the bus as safe as possible.”

But Kurdock predicted it will likely face pushback from the owners of the nation’s half-million school buses, much like the industry has opposed the NTSB’s longstanding recommendation to add seat belts to school buses.

Several states have required seat belts, but most school buses do not have them partly because the buses are regarded as quite safe already. But even when seat belts have been installed, the NTSB said students might not wear them, so they issued an urgent recommendation last fall after a Texas crash for districts to take steps to ensure their use.

None of the three biggest school bus companies that transport kids on some 80,000 buses each day or the primary bus manufacturers responded to phone calls and emails seeking comment about the NTSB recommendation. The National School Boards Association and two of the biggest busing trade groups didn’t immediately have comment.

Of the nearly 1,000 fatal crashes involving school buses in the decade leading up to 2023, 70% of the nearly 1,100 people who died were in other vehicles and not the buses, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s latest statistics.

Only 113 school bus passengers were killed in that timeframe, showing how the massive yellow vehicles are generally safe as long as the children aren’t thrown out of their seats. That is where the NTSB believes installing seat belts and making sure kids are wearing them would make a significant difference.

The benefits of detecting alcohol make this worthwhile

Attorney Todd Spodek, whose New York law firm has handled tens of thousands of drunken driving cases, doesn’t think the recommendation would violate the rights of bus drivers. He doesn’t think drivers would be able to make any argument that being screened for alcohol use is too onerous. (Clearly Mr. Spodek here has never known any alcoholics) .

Spodek said the safety benefits of ensuring bus drivers are not impaired far outweighs any concerns about hassles for the drivers.

“If you’re in a position of control of something like that, you should be held to a higher scrutiny,” Spodek said. “It’s a minor inconvenience with a tremendous upside.”