On a winter bus ride four years ago, a CT Transit bus driver swung the bus right, and Maria Nuzzo fell out of her seat.
“The bus [driver] was going very fast,” said Nuzzo, who commuted from East Haven to New Haven for 30 years. “I was sitting at the end of the seat and when he went to take a right turn, he took it so sharp. I fell on my hands and knees.”
Nuzzo, who has arthritis, said falling hurt.
When she got to work, Nuzzo said, she called the bus company and complained. But because she wasn’t taken away in an ambulance, her incident went untracked in a database of transit injuries. To show up in a spreadsheet of injuries tracked by the National Transit Database, a passenger, driver or pedestrian needs to be taken away from the bus in an ambulance.
The number of those injuries varies from year to year. In 2007, for example, 109 injuries were recorded by CT Transit in New Haven. In 2013, by contrast, zero injuries were reported, according to the NTD. So far this year, 28 injuries have been reported in New Haven.
Fatalities are tracked separately, and in the major cities served by CT Transit, have happened infrequently. In the last five years both New Haven and Hartford have seen one fatality each: New Haven in 2011 and Hartford in 2013.
January 12, 2011, West Haven resident Pamela Caddell-Boyd was killed in a three-car accident involving a CT Transit bus; CT Transit was not found to be at fault.
On April 11, 2013, Homer Bell Jr. was struck by a CT Transit bus in Hartford. It was ruled a suicide, according to the Hartford Courant.
“Knock on wood there are very few serious injuries, and in the last 30 years that I’ve been here,” said David Lee, general manager for CT Transit. “There’s been three fatalities and those are horrific. But relatively speaking, that’s a good safety record.”
The database doesn’t list details about the incidents. On average, New Haven has the most injuries listed out of the major cities in Connecticut.
“Every now and then somebody says, ‘Why don’t you have seat belts?’” said Lee. “The question is: Do you want to make everybody wear a seat belt in an intercity bus? The problem, as it is in school buses, is: How do you enforce that?” He also noted that some riders stand.
Lee talked more about possible solutions and their difficulty of enforcement in the audio interview linked below.
Natasha Wiggins, a passenger on CT Transit, said she doesn’t believe having seat belts would help decrease the amount of injures among passengers.
“All they have to do is drive cautiously,” said Wiggins. “[Injuries] could be handled as long as they aren’t driving fast.”
Nuzzo said she considered suing, but decided against it.
“I wasn’t seriously injured,” said Nuzzo, “but it was just the point.”
The CT Bus Diaries project is a collaboration between the New Haven Independent, the Valley Independent Sentinel and students from the multimedia journalism class at Southern Connecticut State University. The students are blogging about experiences on CT Transit’s bus lines in order to give a glimpse into the commutes of the people using the bus system.
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This figure doesn't include the hundreds injured on sidewalks because the city doesn't take sufficient steps to ensure CT transit bus stops are cleared of ice in winter.