The stop sign runner not mentioned by WTOP. Image from WTOP’s video clip.

It was a top news item on WTOP radio Monday: Metro cited bus drivers more than 4,000 times since 2004 for offenses like speeding, rudeness to passengers, distracted driving, and even urinating into containers on buses. That comes out to over two times a day. It sounds bad, and none of these behaviors are appropriate. But this issue also deserves a little context.

Since Metro runs most of the buses in the region, they have a master list of problems with bus drivers. Imagine what it would be like if someone compiled a massive master list of all the times anyone complained about an individual driver running a stop sign, being rude, or using a mobile device. 4,000 incidents a day might be more like it.

Unfortunately, we don’t have those kinds of statistics. We do know, however, that there are 225 road crashes in the average day, which comes out to 476,775 crashes during the time period in the WTOP data. Bus collisions: 1,650. What about fatalities? During a particularly bad patch, there were nine bus-involved deaths during a 19-month period. Meanwhile, there’s one death on the region’s roads every 22.1 hours, or about 615 deaths in 19 months.

Tuss stood on the corner of Idaho Avenue and Newark Street, NW to watch for buses rolling through stop signs. (Click on audio clips 5 or 6 in the left sidebar here.) WTOP even took a video. Sure enough, Tuss found one. But guess what happened just before the bus rolled through? A delivery truck rolled through. As @RegBazile wrote on Twitter, “I challenge @SegravesWTOP to clock ALL vehicles driving along Wisc Ave. Try to find even ONE that is doing the speed limit!”

WTOP’s Adam Tuss and Mark Segraves did a nice service by getting the data, but then diminish that with the demagoguery of their articles. Audio clip #2 starts with Segraves saying, “Nearly three times a day, bus drivers are caught breaking the law and putting the lives of their passengers at risk.” No amount of lawbreaking and passenger-endangering is appropriate. But they could at least get the numbers right. From the start of 2004 to Monday is 2,119 days. 4,709 incidents over 2,119 days is 2.2 times a day. Is that “almost three”?

More importantly, as one commenter on wtop.com pointed out, most of that stuff isn’t actually endangering passengers. Rolling through a stop sign could endanger pedestrians, which is why bus drivers shouldn’t do it (nor should cars). But endangering the lives of passengers? How many complaints did WMATA log for that? One, and that in 2004.

In fact, while no number of these incidents is too few, many of them have declined. As ATU’s Jackie Jeter notes in the story, 2004-2006 represent almost three-quarters of the incidents, at about 1,000-1,200 a year, but that number dropped to 441 last year, including big drops in bus collisions, distracted driving, failing to stop at crosswalks, and red light running — the major areas affecting safety — as well as issues like rudeness. One of the few that’s up is failing to stop at a railroad crossing. It’s not clear why.

Driver misbehavior is definitely a serious issue, which is why it’s good Metro recently tightened rules around distracted driving. But playing up the numbers for Metrobus incidents that are big mostly because Metro just has a lot of buses obscures the more important issues. First among them is all the other unsafe behavior that’s coming from vehicle operators not driving buses. I hope Mark Segraves and Adam Tuss start working on a story about that.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.