"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

An interesting but serious article in my home town paper today. It describes a driver driving a bus with passengers who has never driven a bus before.

Class

How can this be you ask? In Nova Scotia driving licenses are by Class. Generally speaking, a Class 2 license allows you to drive a bus. A Class 1 license allows you to drive everything, commonly referred to a tractor-trailer license. This also means you can drive a bus if you have a Class 1 license. 

I have driven many buses, and I have also drive a fair amount of tractor-trailers or 18 wheelers as they are referred to. I trained drivers on both, and in  fact retired only a few years ago as a trainer for buses for many years.

Difference

Reading this article brought several emotions to the forefront. First of all there is a heck of a big difference driving a bus and driving a tractor-trailer.  During my years of training drivers, I had a number of former tractor-trailer drivers that could not drive a bus properly and did not pass our course. Others did so with difficulty, while others adapted to the operating differences easily.

If I had to drive through a city I had never driven in before, and had a choice of only using a bus or a tractor-trailer, I would choose the tractor-trailer. Both have characteristics that make driving though busy tight areas difficult, but the tractor combination has more manoeuvring options. 

We Need Them 

There are two sides to every story, and I am sure the article in its quest for attention is only providing one side. 

On the other hand I do hope the company has a reasonably good training program, not just an evaluation procedure. 

Nova Scotia needs them. Its a Maritime company and we all need them to succeed.

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License