Seat Belts on School Buses – A More Difficult Debate Than Imagined

When the question of seat belts on school buses came to me I immediately thought, of course there should be seat belts on school buses! I couldn’t think of a reason not to have them. However, upon further investigation it is no wonder this debate has been ongoing for as long as I can remember. A little research really opens up the debate.

Before diving into this topic I would like to first say that at this point I no longer have a definite opinion on whether or not we should have seat belts on school buses and I will not have one until I am privy to a study that actually addresses and evaluates a better variety of the different types of crash configurations.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), school buses use a safety feature called compartmentalization. Compartmentalization, likened by many to an egg carton, involves the actual design of the school bus. Seats are made with padded, flexible, shock-absorbent backs that are supposed to be tall enough to prevent children from flying out of the compartment. There are strict federal guidelines regulating the strengths of the seats and their installation. Compartmentalization seems to have very strong advocates and an equal strength in its opponents. Where my actual concerns come into play are in the validity of the information represented by the NHTSA.

Normally, I tend to trust information provided by organizations like the NHTSA, considering it is a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation and it’s focus is to “save lives, prevent injuries and reduce traffic-related health care and other economic costs.” However, given the fact that it is a governmental agency, there is little doubt in my mind that it has its own agenda. For instance, as I was researching this topic I came across an allegation that the NHTSA failed to administer and or report on certain types of crashes where compartmentalization might fail. Why would they fail to include all relevant data? I then came across a report by the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) that states that “Current compartmentalization is incomplete in that it does not protect school bus passengers during lateral impacts with vehicles of large mass and in rollovers, because in such accidents, passengers do not always remain completely within the seating compartment.” I continued my research…..

According to the National Coalition for School Bus Safety, compartmentalization is incomplete because it does not include a side panel or a lap belt and the seat back height is still not as high as the engineers recommend. This results in compartmentalization that works fairly well for front-end crashes but not for side impacts or rollovers. If this is the case, one might reasonably start to wonder if the real reason we are not adding seat belts to our school buses is cost.

It was hard to find a true estimate of what it would cost to add seat belts to a school bus. I found cost estimates ranging from $1,000 per bus up to $10,000 per bus. In addition, there are comments that adding seat belts would take up space and diminish seating capacity (a weak argument in my opinion). Many seem to think we would also have to pay the bus drivers for about another half-an-hour of work due to time delays required for children to put on their seat belts and pay for another employee to monitor that all children are using the seat belts and properly. (Parents---are you listening???) I have no problem paying the driver. I really don’t think that an additional employee to monitor this is necessary.

Compartmentalization advocates also tout many other reasons not to add seat belts to school buses, many of which mirror the beliefs of those who oppose seat belt use in automobiles. Some believe we will not be able to enforce proper usage of the seat belts by children. Some believe seat belts may trap panicked or disoriented children after a crash causing further injury especially in the cases involving water or fire. Some have gone so far as to worry that seat belts would be used by some children as weapons. I am sure there are a good many more reasons we could come up with, although, none of them necessarily good. The question is: Does this risk of no seat belts on buses outweigh the risk of having them?

Opponents and advocates alike do seem to agree upon the fact that school buses are among the safest modes of transportation on public roadways available to our children. Every school year in the United States 450,000 public school buses transport about 23.5 million children and travel over 4.3 billion miles. Less than eight passengers a year die in school bus crashes and approximately 8,000 are injured every year in these crashes. The fatality rate for cars is 1.5 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (vmt), 800% greater than school buses, which have a vmt of .2 per 100 million. Does this mean that school buses cannot be made safer than they are? I think not, but until we can figure out the correct way to make them safer we have to continue to study various methods.

There happens to be a pilot study entering its final year now assessing lap/shoulder seat belts on buses in Alabama. Everyone including the NTSB and the NHSA are waiting for the results of this study. Hopefully, it brings us enough valuable information into this dilemma to finally commit to what we can all agree to be the safest route to take for our children. And in turn, thereafter, I hope to return to this topic with a well thought out opinion on what I believe to be the best safest measure to take for our children.

We all know no matter what measures we take accidents will never go away completely and we must do our best to protect our children. It is not a perfect world, and we cannot make it so. Everything has a risk/benefit quotient. Regardless, it is nice to know that the issue of additional safety on school buses is being continuously debated, and studied.



**If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email Chris Zachar directly at Czachar@zacharlaw.com, or visit our website at http://www.ZacharLawFirm.com .