A Canberra bus driver has come to the rescue of a boy who ended up on the wrong route, dropping him home to his anxious parents.

Jeet Gill had finished his shift and reached his final stop when a young boy walked forward to the front of the bus.

“He said: ‘Oh, sorry I think I got the wrong bus’,” Mr Gill said.

“I knew what I had to do.”

But, before making any decisions, Mr Gill followed Transport Canberra protocol, calling the communications department to get approval to drive the boy home.

“They said ‘it would be really nice [to do that]’,” he said.

Mr Gill said, even though he had knocked off for the day, he did not have to think twice about making sure the boy got home safely.

“I just thought ‘What would happen if that was my kid?’ and that’s how I dealt with it,” he said.

When I saw him, and looked at his eyes, I saw my son. So straight away I said ‘No problem’.”

“I just did what was my job.”

The pair made it to the boy’s house just as his parents were about to call the police, after becoming worried when he did not come home at the time he would have if he had caught his usual bus.

The boy’s father told Transport Canberra it turned out that his son had switched to the wrong bus at the interchange, taking him on a route to the other side of town.

That bus driver went above and beyond and I hope he gets thanked.”

Mr Gill said the boy’s parents were grateful for the effort.

“The parents were so glad and thankful,” he said.

“My friends are telling me ‘Oh you’ve started doing a home delivery nowadays’ and I say ‘Yes, sometimes we have to do that’.”

Helping lost children ‘quite regular’: Transport Canberra

Mr Gill’s actions were praised by the boy’s family and many online, but Transport Canberra said it was not the first time something like this had happened.

“It’s quite regular that we actually have children miss stops or catch the wrong bus,” Ian McGlinn, executive branch manager at Transport Canberra and City Services said.

We even had another case this week where a young boy was going home and fell asleep and woke up at the Woden interchange.

“Our driver also called the communications team and we put him into a little field van and took him home to a waiting father.”

Mr McGlinn said he wanted to encourage parents to make sure their children knew that if they ended up on the wrong route, bus drivers were always there to help.