ATHABASCA — An Athabasca area father is calling for accountability after a near miss incident involving his 10-year-old daughter, a semi-truck, and an Aspen View School Division bus in early June garnered much attention on social media.
“I’m just amazed that everyone’s just willing to let this die, this could have been a Humboldt,” said Daron Rude. “Everybody’s just going to go, ‘we’re lucky nothing happened there,’ and just move on from it?”
Rude has lived with his wife and daughter in a rural yard along Hwy 827 for the last four years, and the 2024-25 school year marked the first time on-highway pickups became the norm.
While the change was made to save time on the bus route, Rude said he and other neighbouring families were quick to voice concerns about safety to the division over the course of the year. But this June, the stakes were raised for the Rude’s after a regular morning turned into a harrowing one.
Just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, June 3, Rude received word from his daughter’s bus driver that a large semi-truck had blown through the buses flashing lights at full highway speed while his daughter was on the side of the road waiting to cross.
Rude, a Class 1 driver since 2015 with experience in managing commercial trucks and routes, got to work identifying the truck and driver immediately. After connecting with the right company, he received a short dash cam clip of the incident, and while the company backed the driver, what Rude saw made him question the actions of almost everyone involved.
The video showed the truck, travelling at regular speed passing the school bus with flashing lights and Rude’s daughter on the right hand shoulder of the road. Rude said while the company and driver maintained the lights flashing were amber, he saw the video as clear evidence not enough caution was exercised.
Rude said the buses red lights were turned on immediately before the truck met the bus, meaning the truck wouldn’t have been able to stop on time. Regardless of the timing of the red lights, he said the necessary caution indicated by the ambers wasn’t followed by both drivers.
“I went out there in my van and I measured everything with the odometer on my van,” said Rude. By his estimation, the buses’ amber lights are turned on 450 meters before reaching the Rude’s driveway, a distance he said is ample time to exercise caution and prepare to stop.
“Going the other way at an equal distance, there’s no obstructions, he’s actually heading downhill, there’s no sun in his eyes. And he would have passed other kids,” said Rude. “He should have seen her ambers because they were on well in advance, he had over half a kilometre at least to slow down.”
Rude filed a police report using the video clip of the incident, and Athabasca RCMP Staff Sgt. Mark Hall did confirm a ticket for passing a school bus with red lights flashing had been issued. In Alberta, convictions for passing a bus with red lights flashing can come with six demerit points and a nearly $600 ticket.
Rude hopes the incident will show up on the driver’s and company’s commercial Safety Fitness record, which allows for investigations and safety audits of company history of convictions, collisions, and safety inspections.
“It’s not so that the guy gets a slap on the wrist, that’s a moot point, it doesn’t matter at this point — it doesn’t take the risk and it doesn’t take the near miss away. What it would do is contribute to a cumulative effect that would weed out back driver and bad truck owners.”
But more than accountability from the truck driver and owner, Rude is also hoping to see change from the school division when it comes to better safety training for bus drivers.
“All it would have taken was for (my daughter) to make a move out onto the road because the red lights were on. Who knows what would have happened if she did that,” said Rude. “If the truck driver would have swerved to miss her and took out the bus, or swerved to miss her and ended up in the ditch and took out my wife in the car.”
Rude made several posts on social media in the days following the incident, posts which garnered lots of attention and discussion from community members. And while AVPS did stop on-highway pickups on the Rude’s route for the remainder of the 2024-25 school year, he does hope the division will reconsider the decision to continue on-highway pick-ups for next year.
“The district needs to look at their policies and err on the side of safety instead of the erring on the side of saving some time,” said Rude. “Look at what happened because of Humboldt, all the regulations that changed.”
“Why do we need to wait for something like that to happen again to make some more adjustments?”
Comment from Aspen View Public Schools was unavailable prior to publication. Staff Sgt. Hall did note bus fly-bys are common occurrences, but in his experience, those in the Athabasca area tend to be less frequent than other areas of the province.
