Everybody makes mistakes. Like, for instance, let’s say you drive a bus, and you just finished a night shift, and you stop, and you’re tired, and maybe you accidentally put the bus in neutral instead of park on top of a hill, and you hop off and start walking home. And, yes, maybe the bus starts rolling down the hill. It’s an honest mistake. Could happen to anyone.
Screenshot: ABC 7
And happen it apparently did as footage captured in Brooklyn early Wednesday morning local time shows. Frankly, it looks scary as hell:
Whoooa! This is the runaway MTA bus rolling down the street in Brooklyn without a driver on board! More @NBCNewYork #nbc4ny pic.twitter.com/mSPygfRdin
— Tracie Strahan (@tstrahan4NY) June 21, 2017
If you look closely at the video above, you’ll see that the very large MTA bus is barrelling down Palmetto Avenue in the Bushwick area of Brooklyn, and there’s no driver on board. ABC 7 reports that a man trying to change a tyre on the street “was forced to jump out of the way”. He suffered minor injuries.
The bus kept on rolling, though. After hitting several parked cars, it came to a stop, when it slammed into the side of a church. Quite miraculously, nobody was killed in the incident, although Pastor Jose Quintana told The New York Daily News that his church van “is damaged completely”.
A local news reporter spotted the MTA driver walking down the street after the excitement was over. And while police say that the driver “mistakenly left the hulking transport in neutral and stepped off the bus,” the MTA is conducting an investigation into the matter. Regardless of that outcome, this is all a very bad look for the city’s public transit authority. Train delays are bad enough. New Yorkers really don’t need to be dodging runaway busses on top of everything else.