- Willoughby Mariano, WBUR; Joel Jacobs and Mariam Elba, ProPublica
On the day 5-year-old Lens Joseph was killed by a Boston Public Schools bus last year, the driver had already struck a postal truck, ignored a stop sign and missed several stops, prosecutors said. When he got to Lens’ house, he dropped him off on the wrong side of the street and then ran over the kindergartner as he crossed in front of the bus.
Transdev, a multinational company that has been the city’s sole bus contractor since 2013, hired and trained the driver of the bus that killed Lens. Yet a federal safety database shows no sign that the company was involved in the April 2025 crash. WBUR and ProPublica found at least 60 fatal Transdev crashes in the last decade, but the federal database shows only 18 under the company’s name. That means 42 fatal crashes are not identified as Transdev’s.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which oversees commercial motor vehicles, runs the database and relies on the information in it as part of a national early-warning system to identify which companies to investigate or take off the road entirely.
This missing information is important because the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which oversees commercial motor vehicles, relies on it to pinpoint unsafe companies…