Stopping for the school bus

I am going to go find what our local regulation is, but this question is about how, in practice, you'd react to the situation if you didn't know what the rule was (as it seems me and most of my neighbors don't.)

I live off of a two-lane road (one lane in each direction) that connects to a five-lane road (two lanes in each direction with an extra wide turn lane running down the middle.)

On the two-lane road, obviously, all traffic stops in both directions when the school bus slows down and turns on all the flashy stuff. Easy peasy.

But it's chaos on the five-lane road. Of course, everyone stops behind the bus when they're going in the same direction. But because the bus is two or three lanes away when it's on the far side of a very wide road, nobody seems confident as to whether the flashy stuff is meant for them way over there.

So some people stop, most people don't, and then there are the ones who can't commit either way and just slow down to a crawl to the danger of both the stopped and the unstopped.

It's readily apparent that the bus doesn't pick up children from the far side of a five-lane main road, so given the number of fender benders on the morning commute on that road, I don't think it's the kiddies who are in danger. What a mess!

There's a spot kind of like that here on this road I'm talking about, too. I have to say that the speed limits in Asheville are really not just a suggestion. With all the curves and hills on these mountain roads, you shouldn't go much faster than the posted speed . They've been calculated pretty fairly in most all spots.

But "shouldn't" isn't the deterrent it could be.

Yeah, I think the confusion here is the turn lane. In some places it's a concrete median strip, but then the rest of the lane is open.

Myrealana said:

We have the same setup on a road near our house, and I always stop if I'm dumb enough to try and drive down that street before school.

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I've got no choice. I'm driving to the school. There are so many accidents on that road. I think the school bus thing is just one of the booby traps.

It's weird. It's a wide, smooth, well-signed road and so many people get it wrong. I think the trouble is with the lay of the land here. It just isn't very forgiving of aggressive driving.

Ah, here is it. Here in NC, the turn lane is considered a divider. So, the non-stoppers are correct here. Intuitively, on this particular road, it doesn't feel like it makes sense to stop. But intuition is not the last word in traffic management, for sure.

(c) Notwithstanding subsection (a) of this section, the driver of a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction from the school bus, upon any road, highway or city street that has been divided into two roadways, so constructed as to separate vehicular traffic between the two roadways by an intervening space (including a center lane for left turns if the roadway consists of at least four more lanes) or by a physical barrier, need not stop upon meeting and passing any school bus that has stopped in the roadway across the dividing space or physical barrier.

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