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.

This missing information is important because the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which oversees commercial motor vehicles, relies on it to pinpoint unsafe companies.

But the process the agency uses to collect information is faulty: It identifies only a fraction of a company’s fatal crashes.

As a result, the full safety record of Transdev, one of the largest private operators of public transit in the U.S., remains a secret to regulators, the public and the local government agencies that might award it a contract.

“That is a serious, serious gap in safety,” said Peter Kurdock, general counsel with Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a nonprofit that promotes transportation safety and has pushed for improvements in crash data for years. “And it’s a serious, serious shortcoming when it comes to the regulation of these carriers by FMCSA.”

Help Further Our Reporting on Bus Crashes

If you are a current or former FMCSA employee, or someone in the industry with information about the agency or the safety of school buses, transit buses or motor coaches, our team wants to hear from you. Willoughby Mariano can be reached by phone at 617-358-0802, Signal at willoughbymariano.55 and email at wmariano@bu.edu.

The deadly crashes associated with Transdev span at least 16 states and involve pedestrians, at least two bicyclists and other vehicles. Lens’ death and at least two others have resulted in criminal charges against the bus drivers. Transdev did not provide comment on any specific crash.

The crash data feeds into FMCSA’s online Safety Measurement System, which makes safety records public for bus companies nationwide. Instead of listing Transdev, that data often lists collisions under the government agency that hired Transdev or the name of a company it acquired. Also, when crashes are listed under other names, companies that oversee the buses involved are not required to claim the collisions. The agency’s instructions for how to determine the motor carrier involved in a crash are interpreted differently by police who respond to the scene, the news organizations found.

Based in France, Transdev has vast U.S. operations. It says it holds contracts in busing, light rail and other forms of public transit in 46 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The multibillion-dollar company employs more than 30,000 people nationally. Transdev’s only school bus contract is with Boston Public Schools.

Transdev U.S. CEO Laura Hendricks declined an interview. In a written statement, Transdev said it complies with “federally mandated reporting standards.”

“Transparency and continuous improvement are central to our safety approach, and we work closely with oversight agencies and our clients to ensure our practices meet or exceed expectations,” the statement said.

The statement did not respond to questions about why Transdev did not ensure crashes the company was involved in were logged as part of its safety record. It did stress that reporting crashes is the responsibility of law enforcement.

At the publications’ request, Transdev reviewed lists of the crashes that reporters tied to the company. Transdev confirmed that most of them matched with collisions in their records but did not have records for all of them.

The FMCSA did not respond to requests to interview Derek Barrs, the head of the agency, or emails with a list of questions.

Other than the federal database, there are few ways to connect crashes to particular bus companies. A different database, run by the Federal Transit Administration, records transit crashes but doesn’t connect them to contractors. Separately, FMCSA requires all bus companies to keep an internal register of how many serious crashes take place during their operations. However, those records are not open to the public, and companies are not obligated to submit the information to regulators unless they ask for it. Transdev declined the publications’ request for its register.

So while Transdev may know about its own collisions, federal agencies and the public often don’t.

Darin Jones, a former FMCSA Midwest field administrator, spent more than 35 years in federal transportation safety and often oversaw investigations. He said investigators are supposed to consider a company’s serious crashes as part of their assessment. If many are logged inconsistently, they cannot determine whether Transdev or any other company is operating safely.

“ The knowledge of this motor carrier’s operation, any motor carrier’s operation, is critical,” said Jones. “If you don’t have the full picture of an operation, how do you truly know what’s going on?”

At least in Boston, Transdev appears to have had no serious school bus crashes over 10 years. But that’s not true. WBUR and........

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