School Bus Safety: Belts or No Belts?

For as long as I can remember school buses have never had seatbelts…until now.  Earnie Grafton at the San Diego Union-Tribune reports, “seatmates buckle up in San Diego, where newer school buses are equipped with shoulder-harness belts at an additional cost of $12,000 (U.S.) per vehicle.”

But where did the rational for the practice behind school bus seatbelt installation actually come from?  The following list of pros and cons can also be found on the Nation Coalition of School Bus Safety or NCBS’ website and was created by Alan German, a retired chief of collision investigations at Transport Canada.

Benefits of Seat Belts:

• Perform well in high-speed crashes
• Prevent children from being tossed around on buses (far-side impacts, rollovers, ejections)
• Reduction in deaths and serious injuries to passengers.

Drawbacks:

• If used incorrectly, children can suffer seat belt-related injuries
• Limited effectiveness in the event of a near-side impact collision
• Not wearing a seat belt becomes more dangerous when bus is designed to accommodate restraints
• High cost

So what does this mean on the larger scale?  One education reporter, Kristin Rushowy, claims that “experts can’t agree on whether putting seat belts in school buses makes children safer, as debate keeps growing,” especially if a child is killed in a crash.

Generally, school buses do very well in collisions according to the collision research team at the University of Western Ontario.  But not everyone is not convinced that seat belts make would make that much of difference.

Other studies show that most school bus-related accidents and injuries “occur outside the bus itself,” making it difficult to link the need for a complete overhaul of our nation’s school buses with already low state budgets.

In addition, Alan Ross, a Connecticut doctor who heads the non-profit National Coalition for School Bus Safety, called it “common sense” to use seat belts and blamed a powerful transportation lobby for keeping them out of buses to save money.

Ross also asks the tough questions like: “Why do they require … that you buckle up in a car but not a bus?”  This way of thinking also begs the following question for American school buses:  Should our schools require mandatory three-point shoulder belts?

The answer to that question is a tough one, considering the studies on the subject are often hard to come by in the United States.  Even so, it appears that for the time being “buses remain the safest method of student transportation.”

Today, “only a handful of U.S. jurisdictions mandate seat belts on buses, including New York, New Jersey and California.  California is the only U.S. state to mandate three-point shoulder belts, much like those in a car.”