A School Bus on an Undivided Route and a Tractor at the Driveway
You are northbound at 3:45 p.m. on a school day on a two-lane state route outside Kalispell. The posted limit is 55 mph; the road is a single undivided two-lane with a painted centerline and no median. Ahead, a school bus in the southbound lane has stopped with red lights flashing and the stop arm extended. Behind the bus, a southbound car has begun to edge around it into your lane. You intend to turn left into a private gravel driveway on your right, where a tractor pulling a hay trailer is waiting to enter the highway. Your 16-year-old cousin is riding along and asks whether you have to stop for the bus when it is on the other side of the road, who goes first at the driveway, and what that southbound car is doing.
1. Do you have to stop for the bus in the southbound lane, and how would the answer change on a different kind of road?
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Yes, you must stop. Montana requires a driver meeting or overtaking a school bus that is displaying flashing red lights and a stop arm to stop and remain stopped until the red lights are turned off, and on an undivided road that duty applies to traffic in both directions. This route has a single painted centerline and no median or physical barrier, so it is undivided and the southbound bus controls your lane as well as its own. The exception covers divided highways: if the two directions were separated by a median or barrier and the bus were on the other roadway, oncoming traffic would not have to stop. Until the arm folds and the lights stop, hold your position, then move at a crawl and scan for children who may still be crossing behind the bus.
2. You want to turn left into the driveway; the tractor is waiting to come out. Who yields, and how do you handle it?
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You have the right-of-way, but for a reason worth spelling out. A vehicle entering a highway from a private driveway must yield to traffic already on the highway, and you are already on it, so the tractor does not outrank you. Your own separate duty is that a left turn across oncoming traffic must yield to oncoming vehicles - and the tractor is still off the roadway, so it is not yet oncoming traffic. Practically: signal well in advance, slow early so the tractor's driver can read your intent, and do not swing wide or cut the corner into the gravel. Do not wave the tractor out; your courtesy can pull it into the lane where the southbound car is already coming around the bus.
3. The southbound driver is edging around the bus. What do you anticipate and what do you do?
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Treat it as a violation in progress and, more importantly, as a warning about children. Passing a school bus with red lights on an undivided road is illegal in Montana, so that driver is either confused or impatient - and either way is not watching for a child. Expect a child to appear from in front of or behind the bus, possibly running to get across quickly. Cover the brake, slow well below 55, and be ready to stop within your own lane. Do not follow that driver's lead and creep forward 'because they went.' The bus's red lights, not the other car's behavior, govern your obligation, and a car swerving around a bus is exactly the cue a child may react to.