Interesting that this was supposed to be a stepped up effort by the Minnesota Patrol to catch people not wearing belts this weekend. Overtime allotted and everything as I mentioned. I drove 400 miles on Minnesota roads and I saw one patrol car. It was parked at a shop waiting for an oil change. I don’t know where they all were but maybe no one wanted to work the weekend. Still like I said 93% compliance without an effort is not bad. In 1968 I did have seat belts put in my 59 Pontiac and always used them, so I’m part of the 93%. Our 68 Dart even had shoulder harnesses and they were used although somewhat cumbersome.
Even though I’m a believer I kinda think I would have been injured a lot more when my VW Bug got T boned. Half the seat was caved in and I slid across the seat absorbing the impact rather than being held tight in the seat as the side was caved in. I guess none of this stuff is the be all end all as some like to make us believe. My cousin would have died anyway with a belt on as the engine was pushed into the front seat, and I’ve seen a few school buses on fire to wonder how young kiddies would react if they were belted too. Just because someone in Japan does something though, doesn’t mean that we should. They wear face masks a lot too and I wouldn’t eat raw fish. Just saying monkey see monkey do is all. But I wear belts all the time but I do have a break out tool and belt knife in each car in case I end up in a swamp.
And that’s why school buses that have seatbelts also have shoulder harnesses.
We’ve never had a problem getting drivers.
ALL insurance payments are partly paid for by everyone else who owns insurance. Even the idiot driving 100mph and crashes and lives…we ALL pay for that behavior. And insurance companies as for higher premiums for people who have a history of high speed driving or reckless driving. People who smoke or who are obese also pay higher premiums for their health insurance (and rightly so).
The only people that do those calculations are insurance companies. So yes it is calculated. Companies that sell products always look at safety costs. It’s part of their overall price calculation.
The only buses I have seen here with shoulder harnesses athe the ones used by the city of Buffalo for the head start program and they are limited to two children per seat. All of our buses have seat belts in NY and have had for years , they are lap belts only’.
You say you have no trouble getting drivers. Are you sure your knowledge is current? There is a national shortage. In our area the 6pm news opens with ’ The news is brought to you by xxxxxx Bus company,drivers needed" Some bus companies are paying cash bonuses for drivers to sign on.
Some districts are parking old buses in front of the schools wit large help wanted signs on. them.https://www.npr.org/2019/02/06/692115936/facing-a-shortage-of-bus-drivers-school-districts-scramble-to-get-students-to-cl
The big cities are probably having problems…but the small rural towns in NH and MA are doing better. Our town only needs about 10 drivers. And they do dual duty. They pick up the highschoolers first. Then they pick up the middleschoolers and elementary school kids.
Really? You don’t understand that protecting children is often an emotional issue, rather than a logical analysis of diminishing returns? You don’t understand how fear and tragedy are bigger influences on public policy than logic and reasoning?
Let me tell you a story about fluoride. If you ask just about any dentist, he or she will likely tell you that putting fluoride in the drinking water (at about 1 PPM) has been one of the the biggest public health achievements in our lifetimes. It is completely harmless to the general public, and it makes a huge difference in the formation of enamel in adult teeth as they grow within the jaws of children, improving long term outcomes in the prevention of cavities throughout one’s lifetime. (Although if you are immuno-compromised, you might want to drink bottled water, for this and other reasons.)
Yet some U.S. cities still don’t fluoridate their water supply, and here is the reason: Fear mongering gives you more bang per dollar than presenting logical scientific evidence. The evidence against fluoridation is an inch wide, but it runs a mile deep because it plays on people’s fears. The evidence for fluoridation is a mile wide, but it only runs an inch deep, because logical scientific evidence doesn’t move people’s emotions.
In spite of the piles of scientific evidence in favor of fluoridation, the anti-fluoridation fear mongering campaign gets more bang per buck than the scientific pro-fluoridation campaign. The same goes for every public health debate, whether it’s global climate change, gun control, vaccination, GMOs, fluoridation, pandemic diseases, or automotive safety; an emotional argument moves the needle of public opinion more effectively than a dispassionate scientific argument that flies over the heads of a largely scientifically-illiterate populace who wouldn’t understand half the verbiage used in a peer-reviewed scientific journal article.
…and that is why there is a passion for improving school bus safety, because public policy isn’t moved by science, it’s moved by emotion. You call it a “passion,” and yet you treat it as something far more dispassionate than a passion.
Until you realize that the brain-damaged rider can’t get a decent job anymore and has to rely on social services to cover his living expenses. And that, at least in part, comes out of tax dollars that you and I contribute.
As you doubtless have guessed from our previous conversations I have no problem with paying taxes toward programs that help those in need. But I take a dim view of people intentionally doing something stupid that has a high likelihood of rendering them in need of my financial contribution for decades.
I call it a passion because of all the emotional rhetoric that is spouted when the subject comes up. Looked at rationally school bus safety is a problem that has already been solved co,pared to other motor vehicles with the possible exception of driver training. No other vehicles have a safety record even remotely approaching that of school buses. Especially that of the parents cars. Yet in every bad storm, the schools are clogged with parents dropping off or picking up their children and most of them ket the child ride in the front passenger seat, the most dangerous seat in the car,especially for small children. Emotional, not rational.
The reason I mention driver training is because I see a vast difference in attitude between school districts that have their own driers and private companies that contract to schools.
The school districts are quite serious about safety training and encourage their drivers to take advanced courses beyond that required yearly by the state and pay for the courses and pay the drivers for their time. The district that I worked for followed us at least twice as frequently as required and would call us in to discuss anything we could do to improve.
The private contractor do the training because it is required by law but don’t want it to interfere with quickly completing the run and it shows in the driving of their employees. The large contractor in Buffalo routinely speed, pass each others red lights, smoke and talk on cell phones while driving. I know they neglect ore-trip inspections because I followed one for more than a mile who was driving with his engine cover up on his read engine bus.
I also brought up driver training because of the New Jersey accident that killed a teacher. The bus made an illegal U turn on an expressway directly in front of a speeding dump truck. That is driver error pure and simple. I can tell you that if a motor coach full of passengers had been hit the same way, the toll would have been worse. The construction standards for school buses are higher.There are people who are bus drivers who shouldn’t be, but with the driver shortage, you are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
To Mike in NH, the school district I drove for, all our regular in district runs we made three school runs, elementary, then high school then middle. Most of them in 2 hours morning and afternoon. so you can see why buckling in or checking seat belts 6 times a day and then straightening out the seat belts 6 times a day might add a lot of time.
So you would not be in favor of making pot legal? I really think if you look behind the curtain, that it has more to do with people wanting to control the behavior of people to their standards, than actually minimizing cost to the public.
Fear seems to be greatly increasing in recent years. I blame the “information age”. We are overwhelmed by it good and bad. Advertising especially pharmaceutical thrives on fear mongering. Much use of what I call “half truths”. Statements that are technically true but intentionally misleading. An example is a recent drug commercial where people were being informed that heart disease is the leading cause of death for type 2 diabetics. True? Yes. Of course the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death for everyone was not disclosed.
What does that have to do with it? Of course I’m in favor of making pot legal, because this is supposed to be a “free” country. I’m not in favor of making it legal to drive while high, but much as with alcohol, it’s entirely possible to consume pot and not drive.
Just because the jury is out on the long term harmful effects of its use, so it can have a negative cost impact for treatment, not to mention the potential criminal activity that other states seem to be experiencing. And, how do you test a driver to see if them is under the influence or not? How long does the drug stay in the blood stream and impact behavior? Hours, days, weeks? Just a little to broad to say you are against anything that causes a cost to the tax payer. We all pick and choose according to our world view and I still maintain a lot of it is the desire to control the behavior of others rather than any safety issue.
I blame the information age for making us more aware of it, but I don’t think it’s any more prevalent than it ever was. Remember LBJ’s “Daisy” campaign commercial from 1964?
(That was 7 years before I was born, so I don’t exactly “remember” it, but I do recall that using fear as a tool was a thing back then.)
Remember Walter Mondale’s “Teach Your Parents” ad from 1984? Remember the Willie Horton commercial in the 1988 election? If you study the American Revolution and the events that ran up to it, you’ll find examples of anti-British fear mongering via printed propaganda. Do more recent examples stand in contrast to any of those examples?
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I think it is mostly a matter of perspective. When one spends time with honors students who learn a lot about history and art and have a positive outlook, one tends to have a positive outlook. When one spends time around pessimists and skeptics, one tends to be pessimistic and skeptical. Attitudes are contagious.
We know of alcohol’s short and long term harmful effects, but we as a country ended prohibition anyway.
As I’ve already said in this discussion, American democratic public policy is seldom about the science. Ending marijuana prohibition is more about taking power away from drug cartels than it is about the health consequences of using it.
…and not just to keep this car related, but because it is relevant: I have no objection to testing the effects of marijuana on driving, because the world’s functioning users and addicts get their fix at home. That’s what makes them functioning addicts, that they use their substances responsibly.
It’s not one or the other, @bing, it’s both. I’m in favor of forcing motorcycle riders to wear helmets to reduce the cost of long term care for those in accidents. Others may be in favor of it to make riders conform to their standards. Still, the conformance crowd may well have a reason behind their insistence.
Personally, I don’t really care how many people die from not wearing helmets. Florida has a long list of people who are waiting for organ transplants, and if you don’t value your life enough to take care of your brain, why should I care more than you do?
Having said that, I do have empathy and sympathy for the children of stupid adults. I don’t want them to grow up as orphans. I’m sentimental that way, especially since I know they will be worse off in the foster care system. Making sure they have parents and a home benefits all of us, and letting them become orphans because some yahoo who doesn’t want to wear a helmet when he splits lanes is a disservice to them.
Even states that require helmets only require DOT certified helmets. They don’t require full-face Snell-endorsed helmets, and chances are if you’re in a collision wearing one of those half-shell DOT helmets, you’re going to be either a vegetable or an organ donor when your brain stem takes damage.
Heh heh. Like I said I always wear mine. If you really are concerned about kids having parents though, you must be mad as heck about some of the government programs that reward splitting the family up. Then I think about the explosion of HOAs that regulate every aspect of a home including color, flags, decorations, grass height, etc. There truly are a great number of people that simply want others to conform to their standards and use money and laws as a way to do it. Naw I don’t belong to one and can paint my house any color I want. We do have noise restrictions though so if I’m using the power saw after 10:00 I have to shut the garage door.
If this wasn’t Car Talk, I’d follow you down that rabbit hole deflection and explain the circumstances where that is the lesser of evils. Since I was talking about automotive deaths, I’m going to stay on track and say that parents dying unnecessarily isn’t comparable.
Fair enough but responsible parents see that their kids are provided for should the parents die in a car crash. You provide money and determine who will care for the kids ahead of time. Bad stuff happens regardless of seat belt use so gotta be prepared for the worse case.
