Bowie crash involving Prince George's County school bus sends driver to hospital
Children on the bus were unharmed, but the Bowie crash shut down lanes near Old Chapel Road and sent one driver to the hospital in the afternoon.
A crash involving a Prince George’s County school bus and a car shut down lanes near Old Chapel Road and Laurel-Bowie Road in Bowie on Friday afternoon, sending one driver to the hospital and forcing police and firefighters to control traffic in a busy school corridor.
Officers were called to the scene around 2:45 p.m. and found the driver of the other vehicle hurt. Police said the injuries were serious but not life-threatening, and the driver was taken to a hospital. Children were on the bus at the time of the crash, but none were hurt, turning what could have been a much larger school-transportation emergency into a serious but contained collision.
The shutdown lingered into the late afternoon. Bowie Police asked drivers to use alternate routes while lanes remained closed, and first responders with Prince George’s County Fire and EMS stayed on scene as crews investigated and cleared the roadway. By just before 4 p.m., the intersection was still tied up, underscoring how quickly a bus crash can ripple beyond the vehicles involved and into the daily commute across Bowie.
The incident also drew attention because Prince George’s County Public Schools says its transportation system carries about 85,000 bus riders every day. That scale helps explain why even a single bus crash quickly becomes a major public-safety event for families, school officials and motorists trying to get through one of the county’s busier corridors.
Maryland transportation officials have repeatedly framed school-bus safety as part of a broader Serious About Safety effort, noting that children are especially vulnerable when they are waiting at bus stops, boarding or exiting buses. Those risks matter on routes like Laurel-Bowie Road, where traffic, school transportation and neighborhood access often overlap.
The Bowie crash came amid a run of serious collisions on Laurel-Bowie Road and nearby stretches, including a crash near Old Laurel Bowie Road that left one person dead and another hospitalized earlier in the spring. That recent history gives added weight to another afternoon shutdown on the same corridor and raises fresh concern about whether the area’s road patterns are safe enough for bus traffic, school travel and the steady flow of drivers moving through eastern Prince George’s County.
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