Last night at 7 p.m., a driver for the MTA's BxM18 line apparently passed out while taking passengers up Madison Avenue near 80th Street. Luckily, after a few blocks, a quick-thinking passenger took control of the bus and managed to stop it at 85th Street. Guy Praisler said, "I wasn’t trying to be hero. I just wanted to stop the bus."
Praisler and the other passengers were startled when the bus suddenly started to gain speed. Leslie Bautista said, "I look up, and then I see [the driver] going faster, and he’s swerving towards the right, and he’s hitting cars. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’ and he’s hitting another one, and he hits another one." WCBS 2 reports, "[T]he bus kept going, demolishing a sports utility vehicle that had to be towed away. The bus then rear-ended a taxi that had stopped at a red light, and pushed another car into a mangled fence, before a couple of passengers finally took control, police said."
The driver's foot was still on the gas. The Post reports, "Praisler managed to ease the unconscious driver’s foot off the gas pedal, which, in accordance with the design of city buses, caused it to stop at about 85th street." He added, "We started hitting cars, people started screaming. I figured something happened to the driver and I just jumped up and held the wheel."
Another passenger told WCBS 2, "I think he passed out. Either he had an asthmatic attack or he had a heart attack. I’m not sure what happened to him. But when I was up front, he was unconscious, and basically, he lost control of the bus, and we basically, me and another individual, stopped the bus. And I pulled the driver away and shook him so he hit the brake, and the other person tried to steer it out of the way."
After the bus stopped and firefighters helped open the bus, the driver woke up and was taken to Columbia-Presbyterian; passengers called him a one of the "nicest" drivers. Overall, 25 people were injured, mostly with minor injuries, but some of the injured were those in vehicles hit by the bus.
