Tag: buses

It will be interesting to see how strictly this is enforced:

Boarding bus passengers will now be greeted by signs telling them not to bring food and beverages on with them.

The Seoul Metropolitan Government put up signs at every bus stop and bus on Thursday. The signs read, “Let’s not carry coffee or any other food and beverages when boarding the bus. Bus drivers may deny passengers carrying any food or beverages in cups, or other unsanitary and dangerous items to maintain safety and prevent any harm to passengers.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

South Korea’s Transport Minister Kim Hyun-mi (2nd from R) gets on an autonomous bus, which underwent a trial run using the world’s first fifth-generation (5G) network service of South Korea’s second-biggest mobile carrier KT Corp., at the Korea Transportation Authority’s Transportation Safety Research and Development Institute in Hwaseong, west of Seoul, on Feb. 5, 2018. (Yonhap)

This is a really horrible story about a boy trapped in a locked bus in Gwangju:

Choi was 5 years old when he was left behind on a school bus on July 29 last year. The driver neglected to check whether any students were aboard and his teacher forgot to take roll.

For seven and a half hours, Choi was alone, barely able to breathe in the scorching heat. Temperatures hit more than 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) in Gwangju, where he lived, and by the time police found him, his body temperature hovered around 42 degrees. He was unconscious.

Choi now lies on a hospital bed in Chonnam National University Hospital, unmoving except to occasionally cough. In the year since, he has yet to regain consciousness.

Choi is one of a number of similar cases. In January, a 3-year-old was left on her kindergarten bus for more than an hour in Daegu after coming back from a field trip. In February, a 6-year-old boy was left for 40 minutes on a school bus in Gwangyang, South Jeolla. The child was rescued after a passerby called police. In May, a 5-year-old in Gwacheon, Gyeonggi, was abandoned for two and a half hours.

Choi’s mother spends day and night by his side, waiting for her son to wake up. The hospital fees are being covered by the bus operator and the Gwangju School Safety and Insurance Association.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but the bus driver and the teacher were both given a few months in jail for not accounting for all the students getting off the bus.

This is a really horrible tragedy which appears to have been caused by negligence by the driver:

A fire on a tour bus killed 10 people Thursday night on a highway in Ulsan. Seven others on the bus, which was carrying 22 people including a tour guide and the driver, were injured.

About 10:10 p.m., the bus scraped against a crash barrier several times while changing lanes. It then caught fire.

The passengers could not get out because the crash barrier was blocking the door. Some of them managed to break the window and escape, but 10 people could not escape from the smoke and fire, survivors and witnesses said.

Firefighters extinguished the fire at 11:01 p.m. Only the frame of the bus was left.
The tour guide told police that they couldn’t find the emergency hammer, so the driver used a fire extinguisher to break the windows.

The driver, surnamed Lee, 49, claimed that one of the tires went flat and made the bus lose balance. He added he did not doze off. But police suspect he was speeding, based on traffic camera footage and testimony from some of the passengers that the bus was travelling at high speed before suddenly changing lanes.

Police will request an arrest warrant for the driver for accidental homicide, saying Lee did not drive safely enough. “The driver claims the accident was caused by a flat tire, so we will send the bus to the National Forensic Service for inspection,” Choi Ik-soo, chief of the Ulju Police Station, told journalists at a briefing. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.