8 ms·

Why your child's school bus has no seat belts

171 points by thedoctor 16y ago

mannicken 16y ago
That's also why there's no need to put on a seatbelt when you're sitting in the back of a car. I rarely do.
- jamii 16y ago
  Because you are a small child and your car is as tall as a bus and the seats are designed to cushion impacts anyway?
  - Retric 16y ago
    Your car is also huge, yellow, and driven by a sober professional?
    - bradleyland 16y ago
      And probably the single most important statistic: weighs close to 30,000 lbs without 80+ bodies on board.
- lee 16y ago
  Can you cite where you got this? I imagine it'd be very easy to get ejected from the back seat of a car in a rollover/accident. Do you ever sit in the middle back seat?
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    Forget the middle. Think about your forehead meeting the driver's skull if you're sitting behind him and suddenly the car isn't moving anymore because the front of it is wrapped around a concrete barrier.
- rimantas 16y ago
  Why? Because your car is 40 times less safe than school bus? In fact, those in the back without seat belts are not only risking their own lives, but are also a deadly threat for the driver and a passenger in front. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwkGMeQjTQ#t=4m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwkGMeQjTQ#t=4m (in Russian. The first test is with front with seatbelts, in the back only child is using it. The next test is front without seat belts, in the back both adults are using them, a child is not). BTW, in my country seat belts are mandatory in both front and back of the vehicle.
- nakkiel 16y ago
  And that is called irony.
- TrevorJ 16y ago
  Actually, the big reason to put on your belt in the rear of the car is that the mortality rate of the front seat passengers goes through the roof when the rear passenger does not have a belt on. The front seat passenger is held in place by a seatbelt and then pummeled from behind by the person in the rear seat slamming into the back of the front seat.
- smackfu 16y ago
  If your car had no seat belts in back, then it would have the 4" of foam on the back of the front seats, and you might be OK.
- jpr 16y ago
  I can just hope that the people in the front seats realize that you are effectively risking their lives by your stupidity before it's too late.
pavel_lishin 16y ago
> "Even the smallest reduction in the number of bus riders could result in more children being killed or injured when using alternative forms of transportation," it said. Fascinating, someone actually thinking rationally about safety.
- codevandal 16y ago
  Replace "bus riders" with "airline passengers" and you've got a great argument against the new TSA screening processes.
  - maeon3 16y ago
    By that logic, TSA actually makes people less safe by causing people to take long dangerous road trips over safe flights.
    - daniel-cussen 16y ago
      That's exactly right.
    - Symmetry 16y ago
      Yes, the TSA's policies cause somewhere on the order of 100 extra road deaths each year.
      - skymt 16y ago
        If you have a source for that number, I'd love to spread it around. Edit: I found a paper from 2007 that claims there were 129 extra driving fatalities in the last quarter of 2002 due to harsher airport security. http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf (page 27)
        paulgerhardt 16y ago
        And another 1,200 more deaths than expected in the three months following 9/11: http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal to those of dying in a terrorist attack: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-airport-x-ray-scanners-harmful http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...
jws 16y ago
Alex Johnson must not have remembered the editors this Christmas. …evidence is incomplete and uunconvincing, and they unconvincing, arguing that…
dotBen 16y ago
"The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact," It's remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child's body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms. I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as 'unfriending' someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user's perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event. I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending". (nb: I'm not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)
- tel 16y ago
  I don't disagree that "we could make better products" when analyzing things from a human point of view — that's practically day 0 in any industrial design class — but I dispute the implicit comparison here. It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life. It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our work, building these things and having them work, is distinctly beyond human terms. It's why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that. Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer technology we're working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of Job's recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of "technology" and "liberal arts". Always keep that intersection in mind even when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.
  - Natsu 16y ago
    > It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life. I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. One day, I woke up to hear her screaming. She's very old and has weak bones. One day, her leg just snapped in half under her. Maybe it is dehumanizing or something not to lose your mind just because your own Grandmother is on the floor screaming, lying in a huge pool of her own blood. But I had to do first aid. I had to get the paramedics. I was the only person there and if I had gone to pieces, she would have died. She's fine now, though. We got her good care. She can even walk again.
rookie 16y ago
> "six children die each year in bus accidents" Those seem to be ridiculously good numbers and back up everything stated in this article. I would worry that making ANY changes could actually increase that number.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  This seems to be the cue for those annoying people to start reciting "if it saves even one life...". In reality, these numbers are incredibly good, so much that chasing after any improvement is bound to be extremely expensive. The money that would be spent on seatbelts or whatever could obviously be invested to greater effect in some other effort.
  - rookie 16y ago
    Yeah, and not only extremely expensive but because of things like misuse, what if the addition of seatbelts actually results in more deaths?
  - bayleo 16y ago
    If you wanted to be even more heartless (rational) you could approximate a statistical value of life for those casualties. It wouldn't compare favorably to even the costs of installing seat-belts in one urban school district.
    - pjscott 16y ago
      Incidentally, this is what the FAA does when evaluating the costs of new safety measures against the projected number of lives saved.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    Sometimes those people are wrong, but it seems that in this case the cost is purely monetary and the budget has plenty of bloat in it where we could move money from which could make the final 6 lives be saved (it is what, the cost of two helicopters and 7 hellfire missiles? Half a bridge to nowhere?). Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would be worth saving the final 6 lives.
brian6 16y ago
I don't understand how anyone can believe it's safer to be unrestrained and free to bounce around the cabin in a crash. It's definitely cheaper, though. And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular.
- kbatten 16y ago
  People's beliefs generally have very little to do with actually keeping people safe.
- nck4222 16y ago
  "And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular." More importantly, that would likely result in more kids being killed by taking less safe modes of transportation to school (EDIT: if the article is true anyway).
- blhack 16y ago
  >I don't understand how anyone can believe it's safer to be unrestrained and free to bounce around the cabin in a crash. Did you read the article? That is the point; most people share your view. Buses are safer because the tightly packet seats act like little pods of foam, like little safety bubbles. If the bus hits something, it's 4 inches of foam that the kid is going to hit...basic physics, f=ma, a=v/t...the foam increases the time it takes the moving body to slow to a stop, and spreads the force over a longer period of time. Since it would be instantaneous, not aggregate (I'm making both of those terms up, no idea what you would actually call this) force that you care about, a longer time at a lower force == a safer collision. Think about it like this: you have two buckets, one of them is called "child" and the other called "seat". These two buckets contain a liquid called "momentum". If the bus hits a brick wall, all of the momentum from the child is going to get transferred into the "seat" bucket. The interstitial bucket you use to transfer this liquid is called "force". The foam seat means that you're using a little tiny thimble to transfer the momentum from the child to the seat...it takes a long time, and it isn't very big...it's "gradual". It's counter-intuitive, but that is one of the reasons that buses are safe.
  - 16y ago
maeon3 16y ago
This article makes me feel like I'm talking to someone who would say: "I don't wear seatbelts because I want to be thrown from the car in an accident". It all comes down to money. If we put in seatbelts things will cost more and I'm not taking a pay cut.
- pjscott 16y ago
  ...Except that the article's point is backed up by actual safety analyses, while the guys refusing to wear seatbelts are making an after-the-fact rationalization that contradicts safety statistics. There's a difference.
- Xuzz 16y ago
  Did you actually read the article? Six kids die in a school bus every year. Awful, yes, but it's nothing compared to how many die in cars. Want to save more kids? Get more school buses with the money, not more seat belts.
sdh 16y ago
In a crash, "The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact," said John Hamilton, transportation director for the Jackson County, Fla., school board. How do you go against the seat when the bus flips over?
- trafficlight 16y ago
  Instead of the seat absorbing the impact, the soft, metal roof does the job. And more seriously, do buses have crumple zones like cars do? If a bus were to roll over, is the passenger compartment designed to work like a roll cage? Or does it just collapse?
- ScottBurson 16y ago
  Too bad the article didn't comment on the frequency of bus rollovers. One is left to conclude, though, that they must be extremely rare, if the average annual fatality rate is 6.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    The busses would be extremely heavy in the bottom, and in addition it would require a collision with a large object to tip it over.
    - smackfu 16y ago
      I think the more common case for a tip-over is going off the road into a ditch.
johngalt 16y ago
Six deaths a year? Add seatbelts and you'd have more deaths than that from communicable disease. Lets have all these kids put their hands on exactly the same surface.
- frossie 16y ago
  Six deaths a year? I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I didn't find what I expected. According to the source below: "Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year. Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses" In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision! http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statistics.html http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statis...
  - ygd 16y ago
    The actual quote was: About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So yes, those six or seven only cover the students inside the actual bus.
- gscott 16y ago
  Brain dead or maimed completely doesn't count as dead. So the number should be higher. A lot of school buses have short low seats with metal frames, those seats should be replaced with the high back 4 inch foam seats.
- duffbeer703 16y ago
  Seriously, a big issue that the article missed is the obvious safety issue associated with having a bunch of kids on a bus with metal latches attached to 3 ft long strips of canvas: kids beating the crap out of each other. I grew up in the country town with a 1 hour bus ride to school, with kids ranging from K-12. The superintendant personally cut the belts out of our bus after a fight resulted in a broken hand inflicted by a swinging belt and a broken window.
dkl 16y ago
My child's school bus does have seat belts. Really.
bcrawl 16y ago
On a side note, Anyone else surprised that installing seat belts would cost an additional 8000 - 12000 _per_ bus. That just sounds a lot of BS. $170 million per state. LOL.
- BrandonM 16y ago
  12-15 seats per row * 2 rows * 2 people per seat = 48-60 seat belts per bus. Does $150-250 per seatbelt seem that unreasonable to you?
  - bcrawl 16y ago
    Yes. It is expensive even for a single installation.. Now, if the cost were $50 to install a seatbelt, then the magnitude of the issue of "costs of installing seat belts" wouldnt be so big and instead people would be judging the "need for seat belts" based on merits. Does it really improve the net safety for children. No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.
    - tyree732 16y ago
      Keep in mind that these seat belts would be retrofitted to existing models, models which may not be designed to hold seat belts since, as discussed in the article, almost no states require seat belts on school buses over a certain weight. Whatever the case, it wouldn't be surprising if installing a seat belt were 150-250 bucks as there are probably a metric fuckton of regulations on what such a seat belt needs to be. This is pure speculation of course and, as you've said, only distracts from the real point. Whatever the cost, adding seat belts would probably only make things worse.
eli 16y ago
I grew up in NY, one of the states that has required seatbelts on all schoolbuses for some time. I'm not aware of anyone actually using them.
ck2 16y ago
There's a better reason for seatbelts on buses. Keep those little frackers in their seats. If everyone isn't buckled in, driver should stop the bus. $15k to install seatbelts? What if they weren't made from gold (or the gold lining the pockets of the vendor).
- ericd 16y ago
  Why are you assuming that the kids want to get to school quickly?
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adolph 16y ago
Wow, thats an actually enlightening article from msn.com! I've been thinking in recent years about school bus seat belts and until now I hadn't understood why the state didn't require them. Now I feel a little better informed about the trade-offs. I have a feeling that my thinking on the topic is tainted by the ever-present "Click it or ticket" billboards. This is something I feel despite having lived through the dawn of airbags, which were instituted in such a way to hype passive restraints. An example of that hype was that cars without airbags had to have automatic seat belts. Wouldn't that be just the ticket for those pesky non-seatbelt-wearing kids! I wonder if in the future: * adding seat belts will cause manufacturers/school districts to skimp on passive restraints * the push to fuel efficiency will lead to lighter buses in the school district fleets, necessitating a move to seat belts anyway Next up: why don't city buses have seat belts?

171 points by thedoctor 16y ago

mannicken 16y ago

That's also why there's no need to put on a seatbelt when you're sitting in the back of a car. I rarely do.

jamii 16y ago
Because you are a small child and your car is as tall as a bus and the seats are designed to cushion impacts anyway?
- Retric 16y ago
  Your car is also huge, yellow, and driven by a sober professional?
  - bradleyland 16y ago
    And probably the single most important statistic: weighs close to 30,000 lbs without 80+ bodies on board.
lee 16y ago
Can you cite where you got this? I imagine it'd be very easy to get ejected from the back seat of a car in a rollover/accident. Do you ever sit in the middle back seat?
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  Forget the middle. Think about your forehead meeting the driver's skull if you're sitting behind him and suddenly the car isn't moving anymore because the front of it is wrapped around a concrete barrier.
rimantas 16y ago
Why? Because your car is 40 times less safe than school bus? In fact, those in the back without seat belts are not only risking their own lives, but are also a deadly threat for the driver and a passenger in front. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwkGMeQjTQ#t=4m http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TwkGMeQjTQ#t=4m (in Russian. The first test is with front with seatbelts, in the back only child is using it. The next test is front without seat belts, in the back both adults are using them, a child is not). BTW, in my country seat belts are mandatory in both front and back of the vehicle.
nakkiel 16y ago
And that is called irony.
TrevorJ 16y ago
Actually, the big reason to put on your belt in the rear of the car is that the mortality rate of the front seat passengers goes through the roof when the rear passenger does not have a belt on. The front seat passenger is held in place by a seatbelt and then pummeled from behind by the person in the rear seat slamming into the back of the front seat.
smackfu 16y ago
If your car had no seat belts in back, then it would have the 4" of foam on the back of the front seats, and you might be OK.
jpr 16y ago
I can just hope that the people in the front seats realize that you are effectively risking their lives by your stupidity before it's too late.

pavel_lishin 16y ago

> "Even the smallest reduction in the number of bus riders could result in more children being killed or injured when using alternative forms of transportation," it said. Fascinating, someone actually thinking rationally about safety.

codevandal 16y ago
Replace "bus riders" with "airline passengers" and you've got a great argument against the new TSA screening processes.
- maeon3 16y ago
  By that logic, TSA actually makes people less safe by causing people to take long dangerous road trips over safe flights.
  - daniel-cussen 16y ago
    That's exactly right.
  - Symmetry 16y ago
    Yes, the TSA's policies cause somewhere on the order of 100 extra road deaths each year.
    - skymt 16y ago
      If you have a source for that number, I'd love to spread it around. Edit: I found a paper from 2007 that claims there were 129 extra driving fatalities in the last quarter of 2002 due to harsher airport security. http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf (page 27)
      - paulgerhardt 16y ago
        And another 1,200 more deaths than expected in the three months following 9/11: http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal to those of dying in a terrorist attack: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-airport-x-ray-scanners-harmful http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...

jws 16y ago

Alex Johnson must not have remembered the editors this Christmas. …evidence is incomplete and uunconvincing, and they unconvincing, arguing that…

dotBen 16y ago

"The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact," It's remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child's body and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms. I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of an act such as 'unfriending' someone as simply a manipulation and purge of row(s) in a database when, from the user's perspective, it may be a significant and deeply nuanced real-world event. I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending". (nb: I'm not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)

tel 16y ago
I don't disagree that "we could make better products" when analyzing things from a human point of view — that's practically day 0 in any industrial design class — but I dispute the implicit comparison here. It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life. It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our work, building these things and having them work, is distinctly beyond human terms. It's why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that. Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer technology we're working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of Job's recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of "technology" and "liberal arts". Always keep that intersection in mind even when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.
- Natsu 16y ago
  > It's extremely important that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power to save your life. I think you're right, because that reminds me of when I had to save Grandma. One day, I woke up to hear her screaming. She's very old and has weak bones. One day, her leg just snapped in half under her. Maybe it is dehumanizing or something not to lose your mind just because your own Grandmother is on the floor screaming, lying in a huge pool of her own blood. But I had to do first aid. I had to get the paramedics. I was the only person there and if I had gone to pieces, she would have died. She's fine now, though. We got her good care. She can even walk again.

rookie 16y ago

> "six children die each year in bus accidents" Those seem to be ridiculously good numbers and back up everything stated in this article. I would worry that making ANY changes could actually increase that number.

CWuestefeld 16y ago
This seems to be the cue for those annoying people to start reciting "if it saves even one life...". In reality, these numbers are incredibly good, so much that chasing after any improvement is bound to be extremely expensive. The money that would be spent on seatbelts or whatever could obviously be invested to greater effect in some other effort.
- rookie 16y ago
  Yeah, and not only extremely expensive but because of things like misuse, what if the addition of seatbelts actually results in more deaths?
- bayleo 16y ago
  If you wanted to be even more heartless (rational) you could approximate a statistical value of life for those casualties. It wouldn't compare favorably to even the costs of installing seat-belts in one urban school district.
  - pjscott 16y ago
    Incidentally, this is what the FAA does when evaluating the costs of new safety measures against the projected number of lives saved.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Sometimes those people are wrong, but it seems that in this case the cost is purely monetary and the budget has plenty of bloat in it where we could move money from which could make the final 6 lives be saved (it is what, the cost of two helicopters and 7 hellfire missiles? Half a bridge to nowhere?). Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would be worth saving the final 6 lives.

brian6 16y ago

I don't understand how anyone can believe it's safer to be unrestrained and free to bounce around the cabin in a crash. It's definitely cheaper, though. And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular.

kbatten 16y ago
People's beliefs generally have very little to do with actually keeping people safe.
nck4222 16y ago
"And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular." More importantly, that would likely result in more kids being killed by taking less safe modes of transportation to school (EDIT: if the article is true anyway).
blhack 16y ago
>I don't understand how anyone can believe it's safer to be unrestrained and free to bounce around the cabin in a crash. Did you read the article? That is the point; most people share your view. Buses are safer because the tightly packet seats act like little pods of foam, like little safety bubbles. If the bus hits something, it's 4 inches of foam that the kid is going to hit...basic physics, f=ma, a=v/t...the foam increases the time it takes the moving body to slow to a stop, and spreads the force over a longer period of time. Since it would be instantaneous, not aggregate (I'm making both of those terms up, no idea what you would actually call this) force that you care about, a longer time at a lower force == a safer collision. Think about it like this: you have two buckets, one of them is called "child" and the other called "seat". These two buckets contain a liquid called "momentum". If the bus hits a brick wall, all of the momentum from the child is going to get transferred into the "seat" bucket. The interstitial bucket you use to transfer this liquid is called "force". The foam seat means that you're using a little tiny thimble to transfer the momentum from the child to the seat...it takes a long time, and it isn't very big...it's "gradual". It's counter-intuitive, but that is one of the reasons that buses are safe.
- 16y ago

maeon3 16y ago

This article makes me feel like I'm talking to someone who would say: "I don't wear seatbelts because I want to be thrown from the car in an accident". It all comes down to money. If we put in seatbelts things will cost more and I'm not taking a pay cut.

pjscott 16y ago
...Except that the article's point is backed up by actual safety analyses, while the guys refusing to wear seatbelts are making an after-the-fact rationalization that contradicts safety statistics. There's a difference.
Xuzz 16y ago
Did you actually read the article? Six kids die in a school bus every year. Awful, yes, but it's nothing compared to how many die in cars. Want to save more kids? Get more school buses with the money, not more seat belts.

sdh 16y ago

In a crash, "The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the impact," said John Hamilton, transportation director for the Jackson County, Fla., school board. How do you go against the seat when the bus flips over?

trafficlight 16y ago
Instead of the seat absorbing the impact, the soft, metal roof does the job. And more seriously, do buses have crumple zones like cars do? If a bus were to roll over, is the passenger compartment designed to work like a roll cage? Or does it just collapse?
ScottBurson 16y ago
Too bad the article didn't comment on the frequency of bus rollovers. One is left to conclude, though, that they must be extremely rare, if the average annual fatality rate is 6.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  The busses would be extremely heavy in the bottom, and in addition it would require a collision with a large object to tip it over.
  - smackfu 16y ago
    I think the more common case for a tip-over is going off the road into a ditch.

johngalt 16y ago

Six deaths a year? Add seatbelts and you'd have more deaths than that from communicable disease. Lets have all these kids put their hands on exactly the same surface.

frossie 16y ago
Six deaths a year? I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I didn't find what I expected. According to the source below: "Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year. Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses" In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision! http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statistics.html http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statis...
- ygd 16y ago
  The actual quote was: About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3 billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. So yes, those six or seven only cover the students inside the actual bus.
gscott 16y ago
Brain dead or maimed completely doesn't count as dead. So the number should be higher. A lot of school buses have short low seats with metal frames, those seats should be replaced with the high back 4 inch foam seats.
duffbeer703 16y ago
Seriously, a big issue that the article missed is the obvious safety issue associated with having a bunch of kids on a bus with metal latches attached to 3 ft long strips of canvas: kids beating the crap out of each other. I grew up in the country town with a 1 hour bus ride to school, with kids ranging from K-12. The superintendant personally cut the belts out of our bus after a fight resulted in a broken hand inflicted by a swinging belt and a broken window.

dkl 16y ago

My child's school bus does have seat belts. Really.

bcrawl 16y ago

On a side note, Anyone else surprised that installing seat belts would cost an additional 8000 - 12000 _per_ bus. That just sounds a lot of BS. $170 million per state. LOL.

BrandonM 16y ago
12-15 seats per row * 2 rows * 2 people per seat = 48-60 seat belts per bus. Does $150-250 per seatbelt seem that unreasonable to you?
- bcrawl 16y ago
  Yes. It is expensive even for a single installation.. Now, if the cost were $50 to install a seatbelt, then the magnitude of the issue of "costs of installing seat belts" wouldnt be so big and instead people would be judging the "need for seat belts" based on merits. Does it really improve the net safety for children. No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially when these are installed in bulk contracts.
  - tyree732 16y ago
    Keep in mind that these seat belts would be retrofitted to existing models, models which may not be designed to hold seat belts since, as discussed in the article, almost no states require seat belts on school buses over a certain weight. Whatever the case, it wouldn't be surprising if installing a seat belt were 150-250 bucks as there are probably a metric fuckton of regulations on what such a seat belt needs to be. This is pure speculation of course and, as you've said, only distracts from the real point. Whatever the cost, adding seat belts would probably only make things worse.

eli 16y ago

I grew up in NY, one of the states that has required seatbelts on all schoolbuses for some time. I'm not aware of anyone actually using them.

ck2 16y ago

There's a better reason for seatbelts on buses. Keep those little frackers in their seats. If everyone isn't buckled in, driver should stop the bus. $15k to install seatbelts? What if they weren't made from gold (or the gold lining the pockets of the vendor).

ericd 16y ago
Why are you assuming that the kids want to get to school quickly?

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adolph 16y ago

Wow, thats an actually enlightening article from msn.com! I've been thinking in recent years about school bus seat belts and until now I hadn't understood why the state didn't require them. Now I feel a little better informed about the trade-offs. I have a feeling that my thinking on the topic is tainted by the ever-present "Click it or ticket" billboards. This is something I feel despite having lived through the dawn of airbags, which were instituted in such a way to hype passive restraints. An example of that hype was that cars without airbags had to have automatic seat belts. Wouldn't that be just the ticket for those pesky non-seatbelt-wearing kids! I wonder if in the future: * adding seat belts will cause manufacturers/school districts to skimp on passive restraints * the push to fuel efficiency will lead to lighter buses in the school district fleets, necessitating a move to seat belts anyway Next up: why don't city buses have seat belts?