Boy On Bike Hit By Bus

I was, er, inspired? Not the right word. Compelled! Yes, I was compelled to write this based on the Analysis-Car Hits Boy On A Bike that Ron gave over at his blog. I was a bit freaked out by the timing of his post, which was coincidental.

File under: What The...
January 13, 2009
To paraphrase a Cleveland Plain Dealer article
Boy Hospitalized After Being Struck By Cleveland School Bus

Cheryl Hill, a 49-year-old bus driver in the Cleveland City School System was in her bus driving kids to school when she hit 'a pothole'. Taylor Price, a 14-year-old James Ford Rhodes High School student was geeked, like any other kid, just to get on his bike and ride to school. Even on cold winter mornings it apparently wasn't unusual to for Taylor to jump on the steel steed and pedal his way in, hell I did it as a kid and you probably did too. But Tuesday January 13 would prove different. You see the aforementioned 'pothole' that bus driver Cheryl Hill hit? You guessed it, was 14-year-old Taylor Price in what resulted in a school bus driver hit-skip accident. Police said the boy was hit on Fulton Road (a fairly main road in Cleveland) near Interstate 71 (a freeway) as he made his way to school, and as of Tuesday nights news was in critical condition. Taylor broke both his legs and suffered a punctured lung, broken collarbone and is unconscious among other things. Now, Cleveland police arrested Hill, who has worked in Cleveland schools since 1989, and charged her with leaving the scene. Apparently the police thought that she may have hit the boy when they found the bike wedged under the bus still upon stopping her.

So, here's my question. How do you drive a school bus for 19 years and not have the common sense to know the difference between hitting a kid on a bike and hitting a pothole? I mean, I can tell the difference between hitting a squirrel and a pothole, how do you not realize you hit a 14-year-old. I mean, I guess even a 4 year old on a sixteen-inch bike; you’re in a bus, small kid-small bike. I guess I could give you a pass on something like that as a pure accident, but this just seems asinine.

My only hope is that Taylor doesn’t get freaked out by this, and gets back on the stead and hits the road. I know as a motorist and a cyclist one of my greatest fears is hitting a cyclist. I mean, most people would feel that way, right?