…and no competent policy maker would rely on just one study to establish a policy, especially an old study from years ago.
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I am not aware of any contradictory studies nor was my transportation supervisor who ran training classes for many other school districts and attended conferences in Albany every year on school bus safety.
If they find a way to add shoulder belts to school buses without reducing capacity that will change everything especially if they can be made self adjusting.
As it is now, drivers now spend a lot of time straightening, untwisting , re-buckling and laying the seat belts out straight forward on the seats because the state require it be done before each run even though no one is wearing the belts. The kids are not wearing them but they do love to play with them.
I reduced that problem om ,y elementary and middle school bus by announcing that the only reason to unbuckle a seat belt was to wear it so any student who unbuckled the belt would be wearing it for the rest of the year unless he brought me a note from his parents that they did not want him to wear them.
Field trips could be a nightmare. A lot of teachers insisted that their students wear the belts. These teachers also thought their students needed help to put them on, but many of them could not figure out how to shorten the belt so either twisted them or even tied knots in them!
lap only belts that are not tight are very dangerous to the younger students. In a frontal collision they allow the student to fly forward until the belt stops them which snaps their head down and hitting the seat back in front of them and breaking their neck.
One point on school bus safety. School buses are statistically an order of magnitude safer than riding in their parents cars.
I wish I knew how to post a link, but when I google it , even though I ask how to do it on a mac desktop I get directed to a menu I either don’t have or cant find.
Just google school bus safety vs cars. A chart I just saw shows that school bus fatalities average about 13 a YEAR in the whole US. Compare that to the carnage in cars on our roads. We are spending a lot of effort on the wrong problem.
If you want to save a lot of lives protect people against bee and wasp stings, not bears or sharks. A neighbor of my son ran over a bees nest in the ground with his lawnmower and got stung hundreds of times, he collapsed and died in his back yard while trying to make the house.
The only reputable studies on motorcycle-involved collisions in USA showed that riders WITHOUT helmets cost the system less.
I think that 1990s study concluded that mortality rates are so high, that a rider WITHOUT a helmet involved in a collision costs about $45,000. A rider WITH a helmet in a collision costs about $350,000.
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I’m trying to figure out what lost wages has to do with it. Coming home from work one day on the freeway, I saw a dust cloud up ahead and slowed down. A guy on a bike was following too close and when the car ahead stopped suddenly, he ran right into the back of an SUV. There was blood splattered on the back door and a good sized dent where his head hit. If that didn’t kill him (which it did) the car behind him ran up over the bike and it was wedged under the Ford focus. Yeah he had a family and it was a nice spring day and decided to ride his bike 60 miles to work that day. With a helmet or not injuries would have been extensive either from ramming the SUV or being run over. Being dead stops the hospital bills right away but being half dead can accumulate a pretty good bill. There are always arguments one way or another from people that mean well but in this case the accident could have been avoided by driving in the right lane instead of the fast lane and not tail gating. I just never care to see that again. Luckily one of the cars had a blanket to lay over him until the ambulance came.
Reminded me of a word processing salesman I used to deal with back in the 70’s. I hadn’t seen him for a while and then heard he had been in a bad bike accident. A couple years later I happened to see him on the street with one arm, a cane, and looking like he just got out of a cement mixer. This was before helmets but I don’t think it would have saved his arm or damage to his legs. Bikes are bad deals among trucks and cars, helmet or not. Much better to be surrounded by a metal cage. Just anecdotal.
It’s not complicated.
When calculating the cost of a lost life, people often include the loss in lifetime income to the family. Usually, this is for litigation, but it is also sometimes used in cost calculations in social science.
For example, if a father and husband dies at the age of 30 due to someone else’s negligence, the family might sue for the wages he would have earned between the ages of 30 and 65.
Personally, I think if we’re calculating the cost of a motorcycle death from not wearing a helmet, that cost should be included in the loss. The man’s family will surely miss the lifetime income he would have earned.
Well I disagree. I understand what lost wages mean and should be considered in compensating someone for a loss, but it has little to do with calculating costs of the use or non-use of safety devices. It’s funny money used to prop up someone’s argument but not actual losses. I wonder what the cost would be of the 50,000 dead solders from Nam using lost wages of a 19 year old, considering this is Memorial Day?
I’m pretty sure someone has calculated that number, and presented it in terms of lost GDP to measure one aspect of the loss to our country. We experience the same loss when a motorcyclist dies as a result of not wearing a helmet.
We’ll just have to agree to disagree about whether that loss matters. I’m pretty sure it does.
…and the loss was closer to 60,000, on the American side alone. (58,000 officially, if I remember correctly)
Calculating the value of a safety device absolutely should include more than the cost to bury those not using it.
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So the driver takes 5 to 10 minutes to make sure all the students are wearing their seat belts. He starts driving and 20% of the smart alecky kids undo their belts. Accident happens and parents sue 'cause their kid wasn’t buckled. Nightmare to try to enforce this!
I don’t know anything about school buses in Japan. I’m talking about commercial buses. And yes, they take whatever time is required to check the passengers.
Okay, let’s forgo safety and common sense because one person thinks it’s not easy enough.
(◔_◔)
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+1
In a way, this is reminiscent of some of the people who argued against seatbelts several decades ago. Their “compelling” argument was that use of seatbelts might wrinkle one’s clothing.
Yeah… and colliding with the dashboard and the windshield might wrinkle one’s skin…
As one whose head collided with a windshield when I was young I’m all for seatbelts. My father installed seatbelts for the front seats of that car within a week, I’m sure at my mother’s insistence.
And my son was well trained in seat belt use. When young he would scream if we tried driving without a seatbelt on.
I was forced due to health reasons to retire 3 years early. I considered driving a school bus. I decided not to. Some middle school/high school punk would need to be restrained and I would end up being fired or imprisoned. No Thanks!
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I always used seat belts if available. From 1977 I never thought of complaining of inconvenience when inspecting and securing my 7 point ejection harness for my Martin Baker Mark 5 ejection seat!!!
What in the “H” are you talking about??? glasspilot was addressing punk kids refusing to use the available seatbelts! How can one bus driver enforce this while driving???
I think the issue of dumb kids removing their seatbelts after the driver has checked is a red herring. It’s a problem that solves itself, with a bus full of witnesses to protect the driver or bus aide who did the inspection.
If a couple dumb kids remove their seatbelts, at least the smart kids who kept theirs on will have additional protection.
Forgoing seatbelts for the smart kids because of what the dumb kids might do is silly. It’s the kind of reasoning that stalls progress.
Solar energy doesn’t work at night, so it’s stupid! See how that works? See why it’s silly?
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If you a driving elementary students, it will take a LOT more than 5 or 10 minutes because EVERY seatbelt will have to be adjusted for length because depending on the district, the previous run was either high school or middle school. And yes with the high backed seatsin modern school buses, the driver cannot see what 90% of the kids are doing when he is driving. That did not stop the edotic legislators from passing a bill making the driver responsible for the reasonable behavior of the students. One of our drivers got a ticket from the state police for not ensuring the reasonable behavior of the students on her bus when they mugged one of the other delinquents on a reward thip to a state park to get a steak cookout, fishing and swimming. This was a class of the worst behavioral problems in the school who earned points for any day they didn’t hurt someone. The teacher and his male aid, noth well over 6’ 200lb were on the bud but the barely 100 lb bus driver got the ticket because they threw the kids jacket they took from him out the window and caused an accident on the interstate. I just wonder how our governor who signed the bill thinks the driver could have prevented this while driving down the interstate. Their parents can’t control them, the teachers and aids can
t control them and they are facing them. But bus drivers are magical and can control 50 or more students all at once that are sitting behind them and still control the bus. At less than half the pay of a teacher.
I don’t understand the passion for improving the safety of what is far and away already the safest and best built and maintained vehicle on the road. Many more lives would be saved if parents would send the kids on the bus rather than driving their kids to school. More lives still would be saved if parents would put their children in the back seat rather than let the child ride up front in a car with an empty back seat.