School Bus Seat Belts Again in Debate

September 01, 2010 (Press-News.org) Recently, two school buses were involved in a serious accident in Missouri. One student was killed, as was the driver of another vehicle involved in the accident, and over fifty students were injured in the crash. The incident renewed the debate over whether school buses should have seat belts installed and whether those belts would make buses any safer.

The crash occurred when a pick-up truck rear-ended a semi that had stopped for construction traffic. One of the school buses collided with the pick-up and was then struck from behind by the other bus.

The Associated Press reports that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will ask whether seat belts would have prevented the death of the student and the injuries to the other students as part of its investigation into the crash.

NHTSA Opposition

From 1998 to 2008, there were over 1,500 school transportation related fatalities according to the Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Those same statistics note that only 8 percent of those deaths involved occupants of buses and other school transportation vehicles.

These statistics make school buses one of the safest modes of transportation available. The NHTSA states that students who ride buses to school are eight times safer than those who ride in the family car.

The NHTSA has long resisted making seat belts a mandatory requirement on large school buses, citing costs and other safety concerns. Their numbers indicate that installing seat belts would reduce the number of seats and add increase the cost of purchasing each bus by up to $8,000. Instead of seat belts, the NHTSA relies on "compartmentalization," a safety concept that relies on durable seats with high backs, closely spaced together with soft padding to absorb impacts. This concept has been used on airplanes for decades.

Advocates Say Seat Belts Will Help Save Lives

Critics, however, say that there is an over-reliance on compartmentalization by the NHTSA. They point out that data comparing seat belt effectiveness versus compartmentalization does not exist and that compartmentalization itself is a dated concept.

The National Coalition for School Bus Safety cites to a 1999 report by the NTSB. That report questioned the effectiveness of compartmentalization in different types of crashes, namely rollover accidents. In those accidents, the report notes, "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."

Advocates of seat belts in school buses point to the NHTSA action two years ago as evidence that times might be changing. In 2008 the NHTSA enacted a rule requiring that lap/shoulder belts be installed on smaller, "Type A" (less than 10,000 pounds) buses manufactured after October 2011, according to School Transportation News magazine.

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