Public transit bus involved in crash

ANTIGO — A public transit bus failed to yield at a stop sign and collided with an SUV in an accident that resulted in both vehicles being towed Tuesday morning at the intersection of Highway 64 and Charlotte St.

The bus, one in the local fleet run by the Menomonie Department of Transit Services (MDOTs) that holds the contract to provide services to Langlade County, entered the intersection traveling north when it hit the westbound SUV.

MDOTs Antigo Site Area Supervisor Danny Pyeatt said the accident occurred because the SUV was in bus driver Dennis Mach’s blind spot.

“It’s a poor design of the bus in my opinion. When you sit in that driver’s seat, over on the right side, the passenger’s side of the bus, it is such a huge blind spot, and whenever you’re driving and at a stop sign, the driver is, for lack of a better term, rocking back and forth in the seat just to check that right side blind spot,” Pyeatt said. “We’re getting away from those buses as we speak and getting into other buses. But even still, all of our buses have that blind spot over there. I suppose it’s nothing that can be fixed, otherwise it would have been fixed by now.”

Neither the SUV driver, Mach, or the one passenger on board the bus at the time of the crash were seriously injured, and Mach was not cited despite being at fault for the accident, a phenomenon Antigo Police Department Captain Kyle Rustick said is not uncommon.

“It just boils down to the discretion of the officer and at times the desire of the other person involved, in my experience,” Rustick said. “There’s a misperception a lot of times of people thinking it will be harder for them to prove they weren’t at fault when a ticket wasn’t issued. But it’s not exactly true because the insurance companies get those accident reports and it’s clearly listed who was at fault and the facts about why the accident happened.”

Pyeatt said Mach passed required drug and alcohol tests Tuesday and has now returned to work.

“Once I arrived on scene I obviously assessed our bus driver’s state of mind, made sure he was OK, and I’d already checked to make sure the passenger that was on board was OK,” Pyeatt said. “We had another bus driver that came up there right away to the scene and took that passenger to where they needed to go.”

Pyeatt said the damage caused to both vehicles in the crash was inevitable given the momentum of the SUV.

“The car that was coming west on Highway 64, I believe the speed limit there is 35 at that location,” he said. “But at any rate of speed, the momentum of that car pushing across the front of the bus is what caused the damage.”