Visible crew/equipment: When the credits are rolling, a crew member in a gray shirt on the lower left portion of the screen can be seen waving extras into the street. (01:51:05)
Revealing mistake: When Traven is walking back to his car before the first bus explodes, as the bus drives past him, you can see from the shadow it casts that the bus isn't driving straight on. It turns the corner behind his car. Obviously a prop bus is further down the street and that is the one that blows up in its place.
Continuity mistake: Jeff Daniels' character gets shot in the thigh by his partner. Later, when he gets his award, it is the opposite leg that has a cast on it.
Continuity mistake: At the very start of the movie, in the basement, you see a security officer walk past some numbered steel pillars, he walks past the pillars numbered "15" twice. Fixed in the Blu-Ray. (00:03:35)
Continuity mistake: When Jack is chasing the bus on the freeway in the Jaguar, an overhead shot is shown of the bus with three cars around it, but in the next shot of the traffic, the road is full of traffic which is surrounding the bus, which is highlighted by Jack having to swerve around the cars.
Revealing mistake: When Howard Payne's house explodes, a wire is visible as it pulls back one of the police officers who gets "blown back" by the explosion.
Revealing mistake: When Harry and Jack arrive at the building at the start in the police car, you can see the tire skidmarks on the road from previous takes. (00:05:05)
Revealing mistake: After Jack has taken command of "Tuneman"s car, in the wide shots of them chasing the bus you can tell it's not Keanu Reeves driving. The stunt driver has slightly longer hair in a more squared crew cut.
Continuity mistake: In the scene where Jack is fighting Dennis Hopper on the roof of the subway train we see Jack lying on the top of the train getting punched by Dennis. We briefly cut away, and then back to Jack and the corrugations on the train roof have rotated through ninety degrees.
Continuity mistake: In the scene where the plane is blown up at LAX, the intact plane is shown with no mountains in the background. However, the scene showing an exploding plane has a backdrop of desert mountains, presumably Antelope Valley California.
Continuity mistake: When Dennis Hopper's shooting the shotgun through the lift roof, the number of holes doesn't match the number of blasts. He shoots once and a hole appears. We then see a close up of him and he shoots twice more, but when we cut to the ceiling after the third shot overall, there are only two holes in it. Doesn't seem likely he'd miss the roof at a range of 2 feet. (00:18:55)
Continuity mistake: After Jack shoots Harry in the leg, Denis Hopper runs out the door which is wide open. The explosion shot (seconds later) happens and we see the door completely shut. (00:22:05)
Continuity mistake: After the bus has left the freeway and enters the city for the first time, there is a scene where Annie is driving the wrong way down a street and Jack can be seen standing right next to her. She pulls the bus onto the right side of the road and Jack puts the cell phone to his ear. In the next shot, he repeats the same action.
Continuity mistake: In the scene where Jack drives the car backwards so he can tear off the door, enabling him into the bus, he slams into a silver car. The very next shot, maybe two seconds later, there is another car driving behind him like nothing happened. (00:39:15)
Continuity mistake: When Jack is running across the street in downtown Los Angeles, in two different camera shots two different red cars are shown stopped in the same place to let him cross the street.
Revealing mistake: When Jack is fighting Dennis Hopper on the roof of the subway train, a piece of paper falls off one of them and then stays surprisingly still considering they're on a speeding subway train.
Factual error: Harry is a LAPD SWAT team member. SWAT trains and trains and trains, then exercises and trains some more. Harry would not be investigating the case as shown when he asked to see the files for the last 10 years. If he was on desk duty for his injury, yes, he could be working the investigation. But soon after, he was on the entry team at Payne's house. That would have required more prep work by the SWAT team that Harry would have had to be doing instead of looking through the files.
Factual error: In the bus freeway gap jump, a second after driving off the freeway edge, the bus has fallen beneath that edge level of the freeway. It would be impossible for it to have regained altitude to be above the freeway on the other side. It would have hit at best halfway between the wheels of the bus, if at all.
Answer: If they had, there might have been the possibility that to get to these routes they would have to go down a different road and depending on which route they take they might have to slow down to make the turn which would likely cause the bus to drop below 50 mph. Better to just keep going straight and keep the bus going. There's also the possibility that had they taken a different route, they would have to deal with a lot of traffic especially if there was traffic stopped at a red light. By using the highway, there'd be no traffic lights and less traffic to deal with.