I'm actually pretty sympathetic to those drivers. A lot of them are fellow students, just trying to earn a buck in a relatively monotonous job, like the rest of us.
They've got to worry about...
--regular traffic
--tons of students that don't look/have earbuds in so they don't hear, either (driving through campus is like driving through a major city if rated on the volume of pedestrian traffic alone)
--Iowa weather and road conditions
--looking for people wanting on the bus
--shuttling people on/off
--the awkward/huge proportions of the machine itself
--and do this for hours at a time, without any music or podcasts to listen to like most of us have for long drives or flights
Not simple to balance all that and remain concentrated at the same time.
Tragedy all-around, though, despite all this. I remember the one from 2004 or 2005 when I was a relative newbie at ISU, too.