Is this illegal?

[RobbieL2415]

First off - How close is your friend's driveway to the intersection?  By your description, that driveway would have to be within inches of the main road if you were able to pull into that, but couldn't stay behind the bus.

The bus is supposed to turn on their yellow lights to warn about a bus stop approximately 100 feet or more before the bus stop.  The problem here is that the bus stop is just after the turn onto the side street.  If the bus driver turns on their lights on the main road, motorists coming the other way may slow down and stop in the middle of the road, preventing the bus from completing its turn. 

Also, as others have mentioned, you still need to ensure that you can turn onto the road, so you need to wait.  I'm not sure what 'regular' speed is for a turn, but it's usually pretty slow.

The front of the bus was, obviously, well past my friends driveway, and in any case I knew no one from her house rides a school bus.

What...no one would walk down the sidewalk or street to get to the school bus?  It doesn't matter that no one from the house you were pulling into doesn't ride the bus.

Would you have waited, preventing mainline traffic from getting through?

The problem with this statement is that you fail to understand the other option - not turning first. 

The problem is that the bus shouldn't be stopping within 100 feet of making a turn.  Bus should go down the street a bit and then stop.  Kids can walk an extra 100 feet to get to the bus stop.

But then all the soccer moms will complain to the school board about how their child might be :gasp: abducted because they had to walk an extra 100 feet.

[jakeroot]

In urban Britain you see a lot of wheels-up parking on the pedestrian pavement simply because the streets are so narrow and congested.  Much of the road system dates from medieval times or earlier, though for reasons of dust suppression a much higher percentage of it is paved than in the US.  And even modern standards are ungenerous with road width.  Design Bulletin 32, which was used for about thirty years to lay out new estates before it was superseded by the Manual of Streets in 2007, allowed estate access roads (basically equivalent to subdivision roads in the US) to be as narrow as 3 m, which is just wide enough to accommodate a furniture van that blocks the entire driveable width and is also about the same width as the sidewalk highways built in 1920's America.

Having White Van Man (as well as panel truck drivers) park with one set of wheels up so that traffic can get through is very much a second-best solution.  The pedestrian pavements are not reinforced to take the weight and eventually they develop bumps and sags that collect water when it rains and threaten to soak your shoes; in some cases the added weight can damage buried utilities.  In fact there is an ongoing attempt to discourage uncontrolled wheels-up parking outside London (it has been banned within London since 1974) and new signs have recently been developed to indicate areas where it is legal to park with the wheels on one or both sides of the car on the pavement.

It will be interesting to see how much street parking is eliminated if wheels-up parking is made illegal. With the law written as-is, even the narrowest of streets have some parking. Banning wheels-up parking would certainly make things harder for certain estates that perhaps built narrow streets intentionally due to the wheels-up law.

That said, I do find it funny that wheels-up parking hasn't been eliminated already. I don't believe the UK has any disability act-equivalent, but I do find it funny that narrowing a sidewalk to accomodate a parked car is permitted.

[J N Winkler]

That said, I do find it funny that wheels-up parking hasn't been eliminated already. I don't believe the UK has any disability act-equivalent, but I do find it funny that narrowing a sidewalk to accomodate a parked car is permitted.

The UK does have the Disability Discrimination Act 1995, but its provisions with regard to physical accommodations are less prescriptive than our ADA.

[jeffandnicole]

First off - How close is your friend's driveway to the intersection?  By your description, that driveway would have to be within inches of the main road if you were able to pull into that, but couldn't stay behind the bus.

The bus is supposed to turn on their yellow lights to warn about a bus stop approximately 100 feet or more before the bus stop.  The problem here is that the bus stop is just after the turn onto the side street.  If the bus driver turns on their lights on the main road, motorists coming the other way may slow down and stop in the middle of the road, preventing the bus from completing its turn. 

Also, as others have mentioned, you still need to ensure that you can turn onto the road, so you need to wait.  I'm not sure what 'regular' speed is for a turn, but it's usually pretty slow.

The front of the bus was, obviously, well past my friends driveway, and in any case I knew no one from her house rides a school bus.

What...no one would walk down the sidewalk or street to get to the school bus?  It doesn't matter that no one from the house you were pulling into doesn't ride the bus.

Would you have waited, preventing mainline traffic from getting through?

The problem with this statement is that you fail to understand the other option - not turning first. 

The problem is that the bus shouldn't be stopping within 100 feet of making a turn.  Bus should go down the street a bit and then stop.  Kids can walk an extra 100 feet to get to the bus stop.

But then all the soccer moms will complain to the school board about how their child might be :gasp: abducted because they had to walk an extra 100 feet.

There's also the issue of the resident a hundred feet away not wanting a bus stop in front of their house, with kids running around the yard and blocking their driveway.

Finding a spot for a bus stop isn't easy, because as pointed out thru this thread, there's a LOT that needs to be taken into consideration.