Do You Know Where Your Kids Are, And That They Are Safe? Advice to Grand Tours, Schools and Parents on How to Solve the Drunk or Bad Bus Driver Problem
by Alex Lightman
Once upon a time I created a boarding school that attracted students from dozens of countries. Because many of the greatest lessons I learned came from travel, I gave the students the marvelous (for them and for me) gift of traveling to dozens of countries each year as part of the curriculum. For trips in the US, I would drive a Ford Taurus that my girlfriend in Los Alamos who lived near a nuclear disposal site and whose daughter had an extra row of teeth, had donated, or a van that was donated by a visitor, or, for big groups, a huge 72 passenger big yellow school bus that I bought for $5,000 and fixed up. The longest trip was when I would get behind the wheel of , and drive, alternating with the chemistry teacher Robert Samaniego, the 2,300 miles, from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Miami, Florida, where we would board planes to Nassau and then take what I called the goat boat because we shared the 8 hour cruise with farm animals.
Just hours before the very first drive to Miami, Ananda, one of the self-styled psychics who would occasionally teach, claimed she had a prophetic dream in which I had a driving accident that killed a student. My driving was constantly under scrutiny to see if this was the day I killed that student, and I once hired a 6’7” driver who later turned out to have driven my students through the mountains of Northern New Mexico while stoned, so I think often about how we can solve the problem of separating the good bus drivers from the bad bus drivers, to minimize the stress of the former, and minimize the driving time of the later.
Which brings us to Grand Tours’ driver problem.
Grand Tours is a company that interviews and employs bus drivers who drive students and others in the United States. They interviewed Linda Edminster of Gasport, New York, near Niagara Falls, and hired her, unaware that they by doing so they were going to make their cool sounding brand sound much less cool to the kinds of people who might google their name before hiring them.
On February 8, Linda dropped off the tall men of the Saint Louis University men’s basketball team so they could play against St. Bonaventure. Then Linda went to go have a drink. And another drink. And probably a few more – drinks sufficient to raise her blood alcohol level to 0.22%, over five times the legal limit (0.04%) for operators of commercial vehicles. Then she grabbed her keys and, too drunk to drive, went to the bus.
At this point, if Grand Tours was a modern and professional company, as soon as Linda started driving, a non-drunk person at Grand Tours would have gotten a message that gave a warning that the bus was probably being driven by a drunken person, and Linda could have gotten a call. This message would have been generated by an intelligent tracking device, such as those installed on nearly 600,000 buses, cars and trucks in dozens of countries by Cartrack. And then what happened next could have been avoided, along with all the unfortunate publicity.
The Saint Louis University basketball team lost their game (70-55) and then, at 930pm, were shocked, and perhaps a little amused, to lose their bus. They tweeted and posted on social media. The story went viral at when the police stopped the bus 40 miles away and measured the blood alcohol of the drunken driver Linda, and then released this information to the press.
The players were given a bus ride to their bus to retrieve their belongings and then, as an apology, given a plane ride home. So this story has a happy ending. It could have been a very different story: Linda could have picked up the players, and then, with the extra distraction of the players asking her if she was drunk, plowed the bus into a truck going the opposite way, and killed the entire team, leading to years of students and staff at Saint Louis University thinking their basketball team was cursed and millions of dollars of lawsuits and damages.
All of the bad outcomes could have been stopped for less than $20 a month with one email or phone call to Cartrack.