With British children singing “The Wheels on the Bus” in the background, a new ad from the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1181 shows a series of mangled and crushed post-accident school buses. “When inexperienced drivers take your kids to school,” an ominous female voice warns, “sometimes, they never get there.”

This fear-driven ad campaign, which borders on self-parody, is a last desperate push by the union’s bus drivers and bus matrons, who have gone on strike and left about 113,000 Gotham schoolchildren without their normal means of getting to school. Never mind that New York City’s union drivers also have accidents — and that, in fact, members of the same national union drive the buses and trains in Washington and have proved somewhat accident-prone in recent years. Experience here shows that union membership does not prevent drivers from texting or even sleeping on the job.