A Sydney bus driver with a history of seizures who injured pedestrians and collided into cars should not have been behind the wheel, an investigation into the 2016 incident has found.

The driver had been operating the vehicle in Cammeray, north of the CBD, when he suffered a seizure and crashed the bus.

“On the day of the accident… I can’t remember falling unconscious,” the man, who has not been identified, said.

An official investigation into the accident found that he had also suffered a similar seizure while in hospital in 2010 after being injured in a motorcycle crash.

That crash resulted in his heavy vehicle licence being suspended, but it was reinstated after just six months when a neurologist deemed the risk of further seizures was “low”.

Today, the inquiry found the New South Wales Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) was wrong to hand the driver back his licence and had acted contrary to normal guidelines.

Under those guidelines, the driver should have been banned from driving for five years. Since then, the rules have been tightened so that an automatic 10-year suspension is handed down.

“We’ve got really strict protocols in place to assess the fitness to drive,” Steffen Faurby from the State Transit Authority said.

Meanwhile, the driver has said he was “horrified” to wake up in hospital and hear of the destruction left behind by the bus crash.

“I was sad to hear (about) the people that did get injured and the people around the bus – to imagine what that felt like when it happened.”