There are no apparent skid marks left by the driver attempting to stop this runaway bus which killed an 18 year old girl in Brisbane on Friday
An experienced heavy vehicle operator has told Cairns News the driver of a Brisbane City Council bus which left the road, hit and killed an 18 year old pedestrian last week “for sure” had a sudden medical event.
The number 185 bus had turned from Ann Street onto Edward Street in the CBD when the driver lost control of the vehicle, which mounted the footpath, hitting pedestrians and throwing passengers from their seats.
The footpath was busy with Friday evening commuters, some of whom were making their way to nearby Central train station on Ann Street.
Tia Cameron, from Hemmant in Brisbane’s south, was pinned by the bus outside the Anzac Square Arcade building. She suffered critical injuries and could not be saved, despite the efforts of paramedics.
A council spokeswoman said the brakes of the bus had been tested only a month ago.
The 70-year-old driver had been driving for decades and was “very experienced”, Transport for Brisbane divisional manager Samantha Abeydeera told reporters.
This 2022 accident in Cairns was an example of many hundreds of similar vehicle accidents across the country since the Covid vaxx rollout in 2021.
A smaller passenger bus travelling from Cairns to Port Douglas on a wide overpass suddenly veered from its lane and hit an oncoming utility head on.
There are no apparent skid marks left by the minibus which indicates the driver was unable to apply the brakes because of a sudden medical event.
Both drivers were seriously injured and four bus passengers were transported to Cairns Base Hospital, some with life-threatening injuries.
A spate of single vehicle and multiple vehicle accidents since the vaxx campaign began in 2021 has seen road safety statistics soar.
In 2022, there were 1,194 road crash deaths. This is an increase of 5.8 per cent from 2021. Over the decade national fatalities have remained largely flat. Fatality rates per population declined over the decade by a total of 10.4 per cent (from 5.1 to 4.6).
1,266 people tragically lost their lives on Australian roads in 2023, marking a 7.3 per cent increase from the 12-month period ending December 2022. The rate of annual road fatalities per 100,000 people currently stands at 4.8, which is a 4.8 per cent year-on-year increase.
The 2022-23 road death toll has risen substantially coinciding with Covid vaccination rollouts across the nation.
The vaccination program has been blamed for 33,000 excess national deaths in 2022-23 according to South Australian Liberal Senator Alex Antic.
Former Queensland Transport Minister Mark Bailey when commenting on the spiralling accident rate in 2023 alluded to a statistical correlation between the increased number of accidents and the vaxx campaign.
These numbers leave it almost certain the Brisbane bus tragedy occurred because the vaccinated, male, 70 year old, experienced driver had suffered a medical event in a similar manner to other reported accidents.
The council spokesman said the bus recently had a brake inspection and “in any case if the driver had been able, he could have stopped the bus the moment it veered to the left at low speed and owing to only nine passengers onboard, the bus had minimal weight and with a modern air brake system on this late model bus it easily could have been stopped before it hit the unfortunate girl,” the experienced heavy vehicle operator told Cairns News.
Brisbane City Council made the case for its bus drivers to be among the first to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021 as “essential workers” to encourage commuters back on the buses, according to an article in the Brisbane Times on February 10, 2021.
Transport Department figures released on Sunday show Brisbane public transport user numbers were 27 per cent below February 2020 levels.
Overall, public transport patronage fell by 80 per cent the previous year as Queenslanders stayed home to manage the health impacts of the pandemic.
While the use of public transport was increasing, lord mayor Adrian Schrinner said giving bus drivers the vaccine jab would encourage more commuters back to public transport.
“Council is gearing up our efforts and working with Queensland Health to ask for our bus operators to be amongst the first people to receive that voluntary vaccine that will be rolled out because they are frontline workers,” he said.
“As we have, from next month, the vaccine starting to be rolled out in our community, we now have the opportunity for a higher level of confidence to come back to our public transport.
“We know that confidence is a critical issue here. We know that in recent times there was advice from the Chief Health Officer and a directive to wear masks on public transport, and we know that we all had to wear masks around for a few days.”