Every motorist would have had his fair share of road incidents with a taxi. Abrupt lane changes, sudden braking, road hogging, tail gating and even street racing is par for the course for the black sheep of the taxi uncle community in Singapore. But recently, I have noticed that there is an increasing faction of public bus drivers who seem to think that they ought to be king of the roads.

And that worries me.

Public bus drivers ought to know that when they take needless risks on the road, they are risking more than their own lives and safety. They are risking the safety of those occupants within and the innocent road users around them.

To begin with, the sheer bulk of buses and their large blind spot already make buses more difficult to maneuver about our roads. Throw in a bus driver with a cavalier attitude and the propensity for things to go disastrously wrong multiplies.

And then, we factor in the sheer number of hours that a rogue bus driver would clock on the road compared to the average motorist.

For how things can go badly wrong, we only have to look up north at our neighbours. Hardly a public holiday goes by without reports of night buses plying the North South Highway getting involved in an accident. The picture above shows how bad a bus accident can be.

So, it is time that public transport operators take heed of the dangers of unleashing maverick bus drivers onto the public roads of Singapore. My suggestion? Legislation should be amended to put a higher standard onto our bus drivers. It should also mandate that public transport operators include some basic psychiatric test in their training and interviews to weed out those hot headed and impatient bus drivers to be.