By KHT Staff. Google Maps image.
KAOHSIUNG — The Kaohsiung District Court has acquitted a bus driver charged over a fatal 2019 crash in Cianjhen District (前鎮), ruling that an unlicensed scooter rider unexpectedly moved into the bus’s blind spot.
The Kaohsiung Bus (高雄客運) driver, surnamed Lee (李), had been indicted for negligent homicide in the course of occupational duties.
The crash occurred at approximately 5 p.m. in April 2019, when Lee was driving in the slow lane of Jhongshan 3rd Road (中山三路), where the speed limit was 40 km/h.
The scooter rider, surnamed Chuang (莊), was traveling to the right of the bus without a license. The court found that Chuang swerved left to pass another vehicle and collided with the bus. He died at the scene.
Prosecutors and a municipal traffic assessment committee had earlier found that Lee was driving at 46 kph, 6 kph above the speed limit, and had failed to take timely evasive action.
During the trial, the court commissioned Feng Chia University’s Vehicle Accident Investigation Center to review the crash.
The center analyzed 186 seconds of dashcam footage, breaking the video into 5,426 frames for comparison.
The analysis found that the bus maintained a straight path and did not veer, while Chuang moved into the bus’s right-side blind spot from behind.
The court said Lee’s attention was reasonably focused on traffic ahead and that he could not have foreseen the scooter entering from the rear right.
Although Lee was driving 6 kph above the speed limit, the court found that the crash would still have occurred if the bus had been traveling at 40 kph.
The court ruled there was no legal causal link between the speeding violation and Chuang’s death, and acquitted Lee.
The ruling can be appealed.
