Should School Buses Have Seatbelts?

Money and Enforcement Issues Add to the Safety Question

Ever wonder if the present compartmentalization system is safe enough for school children on school buses? No seat belts. No side protection. Children in padded seats spaced close together, like eggs in a carton.

When a former Grant County bus driver was sentenced to 22 years in prison for a near fatal wreck (while she was under the influence of drugs) many Kentuckians saw the video taken by the bus camera. Students were shaken violently and several were seriously injured.

Aside from safe vehicle and a sober driver can the busses that carry school children be made safer?

Some have suggested seat belts for all children but there is reason to believe that might even produce more - and more serious - injury to children. Texas recently required seat belts and shoulder restraints on their schoo busses.

Check out the crash test video and compare for yourself the present compartmentalization system, seat belts and seat belts with shoulder restraint.

This from Edmunds.

Should children use seatbelts on school buses? Think this is a no-brainer? Not so fast. Some experts say yes, others say no, and the government's highway safety agency hasn't been able to make a decision.The government agency involved, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), invited all points of view to be heard at a roundtable in July 2007.

Here's what we found out:
Safest Form of Transportation
First, school buses, the big yellow variety, are incredibly safe.
According to NHTSA, of the 23.5 million school children who travel an estimated 4.3 billion miles on 450,000 yellow school buses each year, on average, six die in crashes. At the summit, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters asked, "How can we make this number lower still, so that no parent ever has to hear...that the cherished child they sent off in the bus...is never coming home...even if it requires opening up old decisions and challenging old assumptions?

"In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found an additional 815 fatalities related to school transportation per year. But here's the difference: 75 percent of those school children were traveling in passenger cars, not school buses, and just over half of those were teenagers driving themselves to school. Another 22 percent of the 815 fatalities occurred during walking and bicycling.

Only 2 percent were school bus-related — referring to children who were hit by buses.

Robin Leeds, spokesperson for the National School Transportation Association, which represents private school bus contractors, says, "The focus on seatbelts ignores the fact that we lose 800 children going to and from school in some other mode. Our challenge is not to make kids in school buses safer. Our challenge is to make kids safer, and the way to do that is to put them in school buses."

Can Buses Be Made Safer Still?

Fatalities aren't the only measure of safety. A NHTSA crashworthiness study of large school buses found that properly used lap/shoulder belts would mean fewer head injuries compared to unbelted passengers. (Lap belts alone, though, showed some potential to cause head and spinal injuries to young children.)

In 1977, federal regulation mandated that large school buses must have strong, closely spaced seats with energy-absorbing seatbacks, a built-in protection called "compartmentalization" that is based on the way crash forces are distributed. The buses were exempted from carrying lap belts. But the government required that small buses (with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or less) carry lap belts, because the design and weight of the smaller vehicles would not offer protection similar to large ones.

Despite these measures, government accident studies from the 1980s say that passengers are still endangered in large school buses when they crash with an even bigger or heavier vehicle, such as a loaded tractor-trailer truck, or if they roll over an embankment....