
Why your child's school bus has no seat belts - thedoctor
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40820669/ns/us_news-life/
======
pavel_lishin
> "Even the smallest reduction in the number of bus riders could result in
> more children being killed or injured when using alternative forms of
> transportation," it said.

Fascinating, someone actually thinking rationally about safety.

~~~
codevandal
Replace "bus riders" with "airline passengers" and you've got a great argument
against the new TSA screening processes.

~~~
maeon3
By that logic, TSA actually makes people less safe by causing people to take
long dangerous road trips over safe flights.

~~~
Symmetry
Yes, the TSA's policies cause somewhere on the order of 100 extra road deaths
each year.

~~~
skymt
If you have a source for that number, I'd love to spread it around.

Edit: I found a paper from 2007 that claims there were 129 extra driving
fatalities in the last quarter of 2002 due to harsher airport security.
<http://aem.cornell.edu/faculty_sites/gb78/wp/JLE_6301.pdf> (page 27)

~~~
paulgerhardt
And another 1,200 more deaths than expected in the three months following
9/11: <http://ur.umich.edu/0405/Nov22_04/09.shtml>

Or that backscatter X-ray machines odds of giving you cancer are roughly equal
to those of dying in a terrorist attack:
[http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-...](http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-
airport-x-ray-scanners-harmful)

------
rookie
> "six children die each year in bus accidents"

Those seem to be ridiculously good numbers and back up everything stated in
this article. I would worry that making ANY changes could actually increase
that number.

~~~
CWuestefeld
This seems to be the cue for those annoying people to start reciting "if it
saves even one life...".

In reality, these numbers are incredibly good, so much that chasing after any
improvement is bound to be extremely expensive. The money that would be spent
on seatbelts or whatever could obviously be invested to greater effect in some
other effort.

~~~
tomjen3
Sometimes those people are wrong, but it seems that in this case the cost is
purely monetary and the budget has plenty of bloat in it where we could move
money from which could make the final 6 lives be saved (it is what, the cost
of two helicopters and 7 hellfire missiles? Half a bridge to nowhere?).

Given these things, I would have to disagree with you, in this case it would
be worth saving the final 6 lives.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Of course there's a ton of bloat in the budget. But once we've pared down that
money ( _if_ we could pare it down -- bureaucrats have been promising to do so
forever, but it just gets worse), there are other ways to spend the money that
would be more effective. It's a question of the opportunity cost: spending the
money here means that it's not available to spend elsewhere. We must choose
the most effective way to spend it.

We could install those seat belts on every bus in the nation, but that would
cost hundreds of millions (and the article quotes information indicating that
it might actually be counterproductive anyway, but set that aside for this
argument). But that money could instead be invested in finding a cure for some
childhood disease, or building a poison treatment center, or better law
enforcement to keep some drunks off the road, and on and on. It seems to me
that any of my suggestions are likely to save _more than_ six lives a year, so
why would you want to invest that money on something that is going to do
_less_ good?

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dotBen
_"The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of the
impact,"_

It's remarkable how scientists, engineers and tech folk are able to abstract
the description of a high-trauma event, especially for a young child's body
and describe it in such matter-of-fact terms.

I note this here not only because it is striking to read but to also consider
that we do this in our own work in the startup world. Often we will think of
an act such as 'unfriending' someone as simply a manipulation and purge of
row(s) in a database when, from the user's perspective, it may be a
significant and deeply nuanced real-world event.

I think in both cases we could make better products if we articulated better
and humanized events such as "going against the seat" or "unfriending".

 _(nb: I'm not comparing the impact of a mass body trauma to that of
unfriending someone, fortunately for us there is very little if anything in
startup world that has such real-world significant consequences)_

~~~
tel
I don't disagree that "we could make better products" when analyzing things
from a human point of view — that's practically day 0 in any industrial design
class — but I dispute the implicit comparison here. It's extremely important
that the person who saves your life doesn't think of it human terms. They need
to be thinking in absolute terms because those terms will give them the power
to save your life.

It again brings to mind the (Canadian version of the) Iron Ring. Building
things that abuse the forces of nature and exert power over the shape of our
work, building these things and having them _work_ , is distinctly beyond
human terms. It's why you pair architects with structural engineers: a friend
of mine always complains that his job is to remind architects about gravity. I
wonder just how many lives have been secretly saved like that.

Of course, the best solution is to somehow hold on to both sides, but I think
too much sentiment these days is reactionary against the dehumanized computer
technology we're working our way past. I really liked the last slide of one of
Job's recent keynotes where they put a signpost labeling the intersection of
"technology" and "liberal arts". Always keep that intersection in mind even
when you make a decision to walk in one of those directions looking for it.

~~~
tomjen3
The hole argument is stupid - there are plenty of money in Washington tied up
to things that doesn't matter (bridge to nowhere comes to mind) which could be
used to buy these damn safety belts. They don't hinder anything really, the
price is trivial and 6 kids would not die.

But no, we got to be all "rational" about it (which is code for not do a damn
thing).

~~~
scott_s
When your injury rate is 6 out of 37.9 million [1], there's not much of a
_policy change_ you can enact to make something safer. You're thinking "seat
belts are more safe, therefore they are better." The rational argument is more
along the lines of "Adding a drop of water to the ocean makes it more wet, but
not in any way that matters."

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States>

~~~
Freebytes
I agree. This would be more of a burden than is necessary. Helmets and seat
belts are some of the very few laws that exist to protect an adult from
themselves. The social aspect of this being that we decrease the cost of
healthcare from people flying through the windshield of a car. Nonetheless,
all children in America should not be punished by forcing them to wear seat
belts for negligible benefit. By doing this, other safety factors would
probably be removed, and it would cause distractions for the driver to check
if all kids are buckled at all times. "Suzy, put your seatbelt on! Suzy? Suzy,
put it on now!" I can see this scenario, and it would likely cause more
accidents than it would prevent.

------
johngalt
Six deaths a year? Add seatbelts and you'd have more deaths than that from
communicable disease. Lets have all these kids put their hands on exactly the
same surface.

~~~
frossie
_Six deaths a year?_

I went looking to verify that statistic thinking it can't be right, but I
didn't find what I expected. According to the source below:

"Approximately 27 school aged children die in school bus accidents every year.
Seven of these are passengers in a school bus and twenty are pedestrians. Of
these twenty pedestrians, fourteen are killed by school buses"

In other words it seems your child is twice as likely to be run over by its
own schoolbus rather than to die inside it in a collision!

[http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statis...](http://www.onlinelawyersource.com/personal_injury/bus/statistics.html)

~~~
ygd
The actual quote was:

 _About 440,000 public school buses carry 24 million children more than 4.3
billion miles a year, but only about six children die each year in bus
accidents, according to annual statistics compiled the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration._

So yes, those six or seven only cover the students inside the actual bus.

------
eli
I grew up in NY, one of the states that has required seatbelts on all
schoolbuses for some time. I'm not aware of anyone actually using them.

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adolph
Wow, thats an actually enlightening article from msn.com! I've been thinking
in recent years about school bus seat belts and until now I hadn't understood
why the state didn't require them. Now I feel a little better informed about
the trade-offs.

I have a feeling that my thinking on the topic is tainted by the ever-present
"Click it or ticket" billboards. This is something I feel despite having lived
through the dawn of airbags, which were instituted in such a way to hype
passive restraints. An example of that hype was that cars without airbags had
to have automatic seat belts. Wouldn't that be just the ticket for those pesky
non-seatbelt-wearing kids!

I wonder if in the future:

* adding seat belts will cause manufacturers/school districts to skimp on passive restraints

* the push to fuel efficiency will lead to lighter buses in the school district fleets, necessitating a move to seat belts anyway

Next up: why don't city buses have seat belts?

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sdh
In a crash, "The child will go against the seat, and that will absorb most of
the impact," said John Hamilton, transportation director for the Jackson
County, Fla., school board.

How do you go against the seat when the bus flips over?

~~~
ScottBurson
Too bad the article didn't comment on the frequency of bus rollovers. One is
left to conclude, though, that they must be extremely rare, if the average
annual fatality rate is 6.

~~~
tomjen3
The busses would be extremely heavy in the bottom, and in addition it would
require a collision with a large object to tip it over.

~~~
smackfu
I think the more common case for a tip-over is going off the road into a
ditch.

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dkl
My child's school bus does have seat belts. Really.

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jws
Alex Johnson must not have remembered the editors this Christmas.

 _…evidence is incomplete and uunconvincing, and they unconvincing, arguing
that…_

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maeon3
This article makes me feel like I'm talking to someone who would say: "I don't
wear seatbelts because I want to be thrown from the car in an accident".

It all comes down to money. If we put in seatbelts things will cost more and
I'm not taking a pay cut.

~~~
Xuzz
Did you actually read the article? Six kids die in a school bus every year.
Awful, yes, but it's nothing compared to how many die in cars. Want to save
more kids? Get more school buses with the money, not more seat belts.

------
bcrawl
On a side note, Anyone else surprised that installing seat belts would cost an
additional 8000 - 12000 _per_ bus. That just sounds a lot of BS. $170 million
per state. LOL.

~~~
BrandonM
12-15 seats per row * 2 rows * 2 people per seat = 48-60 seat belts per bus.
Does $150-250 per seatbelt seem _that_ unreasonable to you?

~~~
bcrawl
Yes. It is expensive even for a single installation.. Now, if the cost were
$50 to install a seatbelt, then the magnitude of the issue of "costs of
installing seat belts" wouldnt be so big and instead people would be judging
the "need for seat belts" based on merits. Does it really improve the net
safety for children.

No, I dont think each seat belt would need to cost 150-250 bucks especially
when these are installed in bulk contracts.

~~~
tyree732
Keep in mind that these seat belts would be retrofitted to existing models,
models which may not be designed to hold seat belts since, as discussed in the
article, almost no states require seat belts on school buses over a certain
weight. Whatever the case, it wouldn't be surprising if installing a seat belt
were 150-250 bucks as there are probably a metric fuckton of regulations on
what such a seat belt needs to be.

This is pure speculation of course and, as you've said, only distracts from
the real point. Whatever the cost, adding seat belts would probably only make
things worse.

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ck2
There's a better reason for seatbelts on buses.

Keep those little frackers in their seats.

If everyone isn't buckled in, driver should stop the bus.

$15k to install seatbelts? What if they weren't made from gold (or the gold
lining the pockets of the vendor).

~~~
ericd
Why are you assuming that the kids want to get to school quickly?

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mannicken
That's also why there's no need to put on a seatbelt when you're sitting in
the back of a car. I rarely do.

~~~
jamii
Because you are a small child and your car is as tall as a bus and the seats
are designed to cushion impacts anyway?

~~~
Retric
Your car is also huge, yellow, and driven by a sober professional?

~~~
bradleyland
And probably the single most important statistic: weighs close to 30,000 lbs
without 80+ bodies on board.

------
brian6
I don't understand how anyone can believe it's _safer_ to be unrestrained and
free to bounce around the cabin in a crash.

It's definitely cheaper, though. And, maybe more importantly, banning kids who
won't stay buckled up would be very unpopular.

~~~
blhack
>I don't understand how anyone can believe it's safer to be unrestrained and
free to bounce around the cabin in a crash.

Did you read the article? That is the point; most people share your view.

Buses are safer because the tightly packet seats act like little pods of foam,
like little safety bubbles. If the bus hits something, it's 4 inches of foam
that the kid is going to hit...basic physics, f=ma, a=v/t...the foam increases
the time it takes the moving body to slow to a stop, and spreads the force
over a longer period of time. Since it would be instantaneous, not aggregate
(I'm making both of those terms up, no idea what you would actually call this)
force that you care about, a longer time at a lower force == a safer
collision.

Think about it like this: you have two buckets, one of them is called "child"
and the other called "seat". These two buckets contain a liquid called
"momentum". If the bus hits a brick wall, all of the momentum from the child
is going to get transferred into the "seat" bucket. The interstitial bucket
you use to transfer this liquid is called "force".

The foam seat means that you're using a little tiny thimble to transfer the
momentum from the child to the seat...it takes a long time, and it isn't very
big...it's "gradual".

It's counter-intuitive, but that is one of the reasons that buses are safe.

~~~
wuputah
While we're here talking about physics: another big reason why buses are safe
are because of their high mass. I was in one accident while on a school bus -
another car hit the bus head-on while the bus was stopped. The kinetic energy
of the 1 ton car travelling at say 30 mph - 1/2 * m * v^2 - was absorbed by
the bus. I won't step through the math, but because of the high mass of the
bus, the resulting velocity of the bus+car was quite low (it also helped that
the change in velocity was mitigated by brakes/tires/friction, as the driver
was ready for the impact).

In any case, as a passenger on the bus, the result of the impact was quite
minimal - there were no injuries on the bus, and the bus actually drove off
afterwards (with no passengers and a bit of sheet metal scraping the
pavement).

Granted, it's a different story if the bus hits a tree or is hit by a tractor
trailer doing 70 mph.

Another reason why buses are safe? The bus is operated by a trained
professional, most of which have years of experience driving the bus for hours
every day.

~~~
jpr
I have often wondered about the difference in accident rates between
professional and other drivers, anyone know if there are any studies done on
this?

