California CDL Permit Test - Bus

In most emergency or crisis situations, students will be safest and easiest to keep under control if they remain on the school bus. Generally, students should be kept on the bus as long as it does not expose them to unnecessary risks or injury.

When inspecting a tractor/trailer coupling, look into the fifth wheel gap and make sure the locking jaws are fully closed around the kingpin.

When exiting your vehicle during the basic vehicle control skills test, you must face the vehicle and maintain three points of contact at all times. If your testing vehicle is a bus, you must maintain contact with the handrail. Exiting the vehicle incorrectly may result in automatic failure of the basic control skills test.

When unloading students at a school, a bus driver must secure the bus by turning off the engine. If they must leave the driver's compartment, they should remove the key from the ignition. The driver must supervise the unloading process.

When inspecting a trailer coupling, you should make sure the fifth wheel locking jaws are closed around the shank of the kingpin, not the head of the kingpin.

If a student tries to retrieve a dropped object, they may disappear from the driver's line of sight. This is potentially very dangerous. Rather than retrieve dropped items themselves, students should move to a point of safety outside of the bus's danger zones, get the driver's attention, and wait for the driver to retrieve what has been dropped.

Railroad crossings that do not have any kind of traffic control device are known as passive crossings. The decision to proceed across tracks at a passive crossing is entirely up to the driver.