As The Drive’s Philly-area correspondent, some things simply don’t faze me. For example, this video of a SEPTA bus plowing a Honda CR-V down Roosevelt Boulevard kind of just struck me as an everyday occurrence when videos of it started popping up this past weekend, not unlike I-95 collapsing, a pig loose on the Schuykill, or using the portal to indoctrinate helpless Lithuanians in our sports lore. However, the shocked and amused responses online indicate this apparently isn’t normal behavior for public transportation in other cities. Pray you never find yourself driving down Girard.
Anyway, this incident happened last Friday around 4 p.m., and at the moment we still don’t know what led to it. A SEPTA spokesperson told local news that the bus driver said they “accidentally hit the gas instead of the brakes.” The transit authority is conducting a full inspection of the bus and working on a report. Five passengers on the bus as well as two in the Honda all reportedly suffered non-life-threatening injuries in the ongoing collision.
The video shows the bus pushing the CR-V through an intersection, the SUV’s tires complaining the whole time. Fortunately, traffic ahead of the bus got out of the way, and the light turned green just as the bus was coming through, mitigating any further chaos. As cars in parallel lanes along the boulevard set off, you can see the bus seemingly slow toward the shoulder, but we never see the tandem come to a full stop.
Perhaps this week we’ll learn more about why this puzzling ordeal unfolded; for now, we’ll have to live with the slack-jawed confusion. Go Birds, I guess?
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