On Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:26:24 -0500, aemeijers
wrote:

wrote:
On Thu, 4 Feb 2010 07:46:44 -0600, "HeyBub"
wrote:

wrote:
Somewhere there's a trade-off point.
In the U.S.:

$1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000.00

We consider a human live very valuable.
Then why are school busses not equipped with seat belts?

Because to do so, you have to design and build a completely different
bus. Seatbelts simply added to an existing bus are somewhere between
useless and more dangerous.

School busses in their present form are among the safest vehicles on
the road.
I suggest that airline travel is safer than school busses and airplanes are
equipped with seat belts. And just because school busses are among the
safest vehicles on the road that doesn't mean they can't be made safer.
Nevertheless, I agree that it would cost more to retrofit seat belts in
school busses than the paltry few lives it might save*.

Fact is, there's a point of diminishing returns.

------------
* One recent report says about 800 kids are killed in vehicle accidents each
year. Of these, about 20 involved a school bus. Of these 20, five were
passengers and 15 were pedestrians. Putting seat belts on the roughly
half-million school busses in the U.S. would cost only, um, 500,000 busses x
30 seats x $75 each = $1.125 billion.


You are neglecting the other problem. You can't simply install
seatbelts in present buses. They were not designed properly for seat
belts. You would have to start over with a completely new bus of a
different design, and after that, still have buses that are not
appreciably safer than what we have now. It's a totally misguided idea
with no real payoff.

Current school buses are glorified enclosed flatbed trucks. It took
decades to even get the seat backs made taller and padded, to reduce the
broken noses and smashed teeth that used to be common in school bus
accidents. They are statistically safe mostly because they seldom travel
fast, are bright frigging yellow, and have flashing lights all over
them, including the ability to make passing traffic stop when needed.

A truck-based school bus, well maintained, seems to last about 10-12
years around here in salt country. (although I have seen recycled US
buses in other countries that are less fussy.) Design changes could be
built into the refresh cycle, and ignore the cost of doing retrofits.
Given the impossibility of keeping 30-60+ kids belted in unless you add
another warm adult on the bus, the best approach would likely be to
make them like a carnival ride, with little padded pods for the kids to
be encapsulated in. That would be an extension of the current high-back
padded seat concept, plus maybe adding a little side to the seat on the
aisle side, and padding the wall side. Unless the bus got upside down or
the driver went crazy, that would protect in the majority of most
slide-offs and intersection accidents. The ribs they added on the
outside of the bus body a couple of decades ago have mostly eliminated
the problem of bus being penetrated in a T-bone, much like the side
guard beams do in a passenger car.

But looking at the question as a taxpayer, the biggest bang for the buck
would be driver training and testing, hardass mechanical inspection of
the bus itself, and hardass enforcement of the laws other drivers are
supposed to follow around occupied school buses they encounter. Maybe
add external cameras to the onboard cameras many buses already have, so
they can get plate numbers of cars that ignore the flashing lights. with
a button the driver can push when needed to snap a still.

But what do I know- I'm not an engineer. I just get trapped behind a Big
Yellow Thing on the way to work 2-3 days a week.

Well, there are a few problems. Drivers do get training, but you start
off with people who are very low paid. It's essentially part time,
seasonal work with no benefits. So, you aren't going to get many
drivers who could get a job doing something that pays better. You will
find a fair number of retired folks, and some of them may have been
well educated and worked at good jobs in the past. You'll mostly get
dregs, though.

Then you put these hapless folks in the drivers seat of a bus with 66
kids sitting behind them as they attempt to do everything right. Those
kids are supervised at home, and supervised all day long at school. On
the bus, they aren't supervised, and they tend to let loose. It really
isn't the drivers fault. he's making almost no money for taking on
that huge responsibility. EVERY bus really needs at least one
competent adult on board besides the driver.

Buses get a lot of inspections and maintenance. The bus company has to
keep records of when certain items were checked, adjusted and
replaced. So, the inspectors look at those records. They mostly look
at a few buses, just to confirm that what was written in the books
matches what they find. If the records say the bus got new rear brake
drums last month, and you find that the drums on the bus are old,
scored and cracked, well then, the inspection gets racheted up, and
buses start getting parked. It's not that easy to get away with lousy
maintenance in my state.

People who fail to stop for a stopped school bus should lose their
license for 6 months. Those are somebody's kids on that bus. Let's
take it seriously.

Most cars that t-bone a bus, go under it. The passengers are pretty
high up.

All in all, I really think the seatbelt argument is a loser. In my
youth, I drove a school bus for a year. It was extra money that fit
around my schedule at the time. Seatbelts would have caused more
problems then they would have solved.

As I mentioned earlier, mandatory helmets in cars would save a lot
more kids and adults (by several orders of magnitude) from TBI and
death, then spending billions of dollars on school bus seatbelts.