Dangerous bus-iness
The case for New York’s Department of Motor Vehicles to shut down the killer bus company Dahlia Group, responsible for three grisly deaths in Queens and 16 injuries inflicted at nearly 60 mph, demands no further stalling, no cowering behind ongoing federal and state investigations.
State law makes clear that transportation firms must promptly notify the DMV about all newly hired drivers and provide a full accounting of their safety records, including any criminal convictions that might render them ineligible to drive — and furthermore file each July an affidavit stating those files are full and accurate.
The DMV says it got no word from Dahlia that Raymond Mong, fired from the MTA after fleeing a wreck he caused while driving drunk in Connecticut, was back at work behind the wheel in New York, a rolling menace whose 2015 conviction legally banned him from driving a bus in this state for five years.
The facts and the law plainly authorize the DMV commissioner to suspend the registration of all of Dahlia’s vehicles, putting the company out of business, once the company has a chance for its side to be heard by an administrative judge.
Acting Commissioner Teri Egan must press the case pronto. And then press many more.
Let past be precedent. Responding to a gory bus crash in the Bronx in 2011 caused by a driver with a hazardous trail of traffic violations in his past, Gov. Cuomo ordered an investigation. The result: a finer sieve on applications for commercial drivers licenses. Well done. But meanwhile, the DMV’s separate process for approving bus companies motored on, its loopholes exploited by Dahlia and who knows how many other companies.
State Controller Tom DiNapoli a decade ago audited the DMV’s bus company safety reviews, at first finding 22 unregistered drivers among 1,255 at 13 companies inspected.
The DMV tightened ship to begin flagging problem bus companies, and for a time spot-checked drivers’ registrations on the road, fining many. Now more must be done to identify companies that employ phantom drivers, and root them out, including more visits by DMV officials to the companies’ offices rather than remote-control reviews.
Legislated in response to a horrific 1972 school bus collision with a freight train in Rockland County, New York’s driver safety laws are notoriously tough — so tough that the bus industry has tried unsuccessfully to get the federal government to block them.
But the laws are only as strong as the state DMV’s enforcement, which must now be relentless.