Watch an Out-of-Control NYC Bus Hurtle Backwards
This is absolutely one of the best things on the internet today.
It’s important to note that in the following video of an empty bus barreling down a street backwards, only one person got hurt, because oh boy, it could have been so much worse.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the driver of a New York City Q58 bus stepped out of her empty vehicle without engaging the parking break. The bus began to roll downhill along a mostly-deserted street in Bushwick, a neighborhood in East Brooklyn, picking up speed until it was just flying down the street in reverse as screaming bystanders filmed it with their cell phones.
The resulting footage is truly one of the best things you’ll see on the internet today. It has absolutely everything: shocked narrators, a Greek chorus standing by to scream “oh, SHIT” when it hits a parked car (causing the only injury, Nicholas Rivera, who was tossed about ten feet when the bus hit his mom’s BMW while he was trying to replace a headlight. Rivera was hospitalized briefly but will be fine.) The bus whizzed down the street for two entire blocks, hitting speeds of 50-60 miles per hour, according to bystanders.
The driver, Shatima Simmons, was an early-20s woman who was only on her third day on the job, and is understandably distraught. The NY Daily News reports that her union is standing by her, so hopefully she won’t have her career with the MTA ruined by a mistake pretty much everyone has made at some point (although usually not with, well, a freakin’ bus).
Anyway, watch the video. It’s truly incredible, and you can watch it relatively guilt-free because the only casualties were a maroon van, a few cars, and a bit of the side of St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church where the bus eventually met an immovable object.
