This Bus Accident Is Why You Should Get a Driver's License (and Mind the Buses)

The moment you climb into a vehicle that's driven by somebody else, you're basically entrusting that person with your life. That's stretching it a bit, but given the right circumstances (or, rather, the wrong), a driver's skill can make the difference between making it to a meeting or going to meet the maker.

Nothing makes this more obvious than flying on a plane, but we all know that, statistically speaking, you are more likely to die at home than in a plane crash. Not the same can be said while being out there on the road, though, so that's why you need to be the one behind the wheel if you don't like somebody else making life or death decisions for you.

Driving the family car with everyone on board is a great responsibility, but there are others who have an even bigger weight hanging on their shoulders: the coach bus drivers. They have a few dozen people riding in the back, so they should be extremely careful about how they drive - or so you'd think.

This footage from China (others say Taiwan, we admit to not being able to tell which is true) shows one such coach bus performing the kind of maneuver you'd think twice about even if you were driving a sports car. A slow truck is blocking the first lane, so the bus quickly swerves on the second through a narrow gap to avoid braking. The high center of gravity coupled with the harsh maneuver and the driver's inability to re-balance the bus make it lose control, smash into the highway's side wall, and then land on its side.

Seeing that behemoth rocking from one side to another while waiting for the inevitable to happen is scary, but even more terrifying is the fact that it was full of people. The video description says that all passengers were injured, but it doesn't say how badly. But since very few people wear seatbelts on the bus, there were probably a lot of them.