One time I was stopped at a set of traffic lights waiting for them to turn green. It was on a tight bend and I was about 20cm from the line, and 50cm from the inside of the road. A bus came up and decided for whatever reason he had to get in front of me (even though there was a stop directly on the other side of the junction). There was enough space for a car, but definitely not for a bus as it was on a bend.
He slowly kept creeping forward, and the side of the bus kept getting closer and closer. I starting banging on the window as he got next to me, but no he kept going. I was far enough back that I was out of his blind spot. In the end I had to move onto the pavement.
I then walked to the front and banged on the door, gave him a few choice words and the driver just shrugged.
[1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/03/02/muni-driver-acqu...
[2] http://hoodline.com/2015/10/muni-bus-hits-kills-cyclist-on-m...
The worst in my experience are trucks, and even more so, pedestrians (almost every day I have to pre-emptively break before someone walks into the road without looking)
The average bus and lorry driver always was pretty safe on the roads and courteous with it, of course. They haven't changed.
But there were a lot of idiots out there in all forms of transport who were not so careful and got away with it because "who was going to know?". If it came to an argument it was the cyclist's word against theirs and if it came to court they could threaten to sue for damage to professional reputation if the case was lost by the cyclist. Now with a helmet cam the cyclist has evidence so it isn't just word against word. In most jurisdictions a single helmet cam recording is not sufficient for a prosecution (and may even not be directly admissible as evidence in court) but more than one complaint is usually enough for the bus/lorry company to investigate further (which they will as there are potential fines for not and in some places that threat has teeth) and evidence from official CCTV and on-bus recorders is usually admissible (the former because it is operated by the authorities, the latter because the driver has consented to being recorded). If there is a chance you will get caught and successfully charged with dangerous driving (or the lesser offence of driving without due care and attention) then bad/aggressive/otherwise-unsafe drivers are likely to put more effort into being less bad as it can get them reprimanded by their employer, possibly sacked, possible prosecuted, and it can harm their ability to get driving jobs in future.
So the average carefulness of large vehicle drivers is improving because of monitoring, the perceived average even more so because we never notice the good drivers as much so the bad ones look more statistically relevant than they might actually be.
I have had a "near death incident" or two, so the situation is still far from perfect, but these days I see more complaints about large cars (SUV types and people carriers) and private vans, than buses or lorries.
I completely avoid ever being next to them now, I'll just stop and wait if there's any chance
f = ma. The bus is considerably more dangerous than a car, even while traveling at a significantly lower speed. As the parent comment noted, there are certainly some aggressive bus drivers out there as well.
If the two objects are close to the same mass, i.e. car vs. car, the energy transfer will be reduced by up to 75%, but otherwise the mass of the larger object is immaterial. That is, a car-car collision at 60 MPH does equal damage as a bus-car collision at 30 MPH.
Extreme example: a 1000 ton freight train "hitting" you at 0.1km/h it's not doing the same damage as a 1000kg car hitting you at 100km/h.
Note that this implies that unless there are other dangerous road conditions (fog, ice, etc), the safest speed is "the same speed as everybody else" so the delta-v is minimized.
Fun note for HN: he had software built for DOS that I helped him get running in dosbox so he could run it on a modern computer. It would reconstruct the motion of the vehicles from the final resting positions and the depth of the dents. working backwards from the implied kinetic energy. Apparently the DOS version was a port of his original FORTRAN source... on punch cards.
The potential damage may be greater, but significantly lower speeds creates a much greater risk of some accident. All things considered, then, it's not clear what's worse at the bottom line.
The chance of an accident is greatly increased when vehicles are traveling at very different speeds. See, for example, http://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/
The sentence could be read as "I prefer to be on the road with a bus since I think it's safer". Or it could be "choosing what's most dangerous, I'd rather say it's a bus".
It's also not clear what the perspective of the speaker is. It might be that a bus is safer for the rider, but more dangerous for cars around it. So would he rather be on board a bus, or rather on the road with a bus?
No ambiguity in that comment that I can see.
EDIT: I guess the use of rather in this context could be a colloquialism?
"the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."
So: I would rather [have] a bus any day.
That's more on you than the OP. It's hardly an unknown phrasing.