School bus seatbelts: Are they needed?

I have often thought about the problem of kids in school busses being killed or injured because they weren’t wearing seatbelts when their busses crashed. It was the death of 10-year-old John Pham who was killed in a school bus crash in Brampton, Ontario on April 11, 2007 that has prompted me to write this article.

The school bus he was in, struck a rear tire of a transport truck ahead of the bus and then skidded onto the median of Highway 10. Students were tossed in the air when the vehicle bounced to a sudden stop. John struck his head on one of the metal handgrips and later died in the hospital.

On April 18, 2007, a head-on collision between a school bus and a truck killed 18 students and injured eight others on a road south of Cairo Wednesday morning. The collision happened on the highway connecting Cairo with the city of Assuit. The collision happened when a large truck tried to overtake another vehicle, colliding head-on with the school bus transporting the students to school. The dead students were between 15 and 16 years of age.

On November 21, 2006, a school bus crash killed three high school students in Huntsville, Alabama when another vehicle made contact with the Laidlaw school bus, causing the bus to swerve and go over the edge of the highway and plunged over a concrete wall on an elevated stretch of Interstate 565 at the U.S. 231 exit. The bus crashed nose-first about 30 feet below. The students landed on top of one another as the bus hit the ground nose-first, with students seated at the front of the bus being crushed under the weight of other students.

On April 18, 2005, a school bus crashed in Arlington, Virginia. A 9-year-old girl was killed and other children were injured in the collision of their large school bus and a garbage truck.

On June 8, 2004, a busload of mostly inner-city San Diego students talking, listening to CDs or reading suddenly became human pinballs as their 90-passenger school bus swerved, rolled onto its side and slammed nose-first into an embankment on Interstate 5 in Clairemont, California.

On January 12, 2004, a school bus fishtailed back and forth across the westbound lanes of Highway 40 (Interstate 64) near Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. The bus then struck the concrete median and bounced back into traffic before beginning to tip. Then it tipped onto its side and began sliding on the pavement. Aboard the bus, children from the city-county voluntary transfer program were being tossed about inside the bus like rag dolls.

I could go on all day typing in similar stories of such tragedies but the above stories are suffice for the purpose of this article. None of the busses describe above had seatbelts installed in them.

As many as 49 children were killed in school bus crashes from 1994 through 2003 in the US. None of these school busses had seatbelts installed in them. In fact, very few school busses in the United States or Canada have seatbelts in them.

Think of a sudden stop at 20 mph, where your child slides off the seat, and suddenly he or she has a head or shoulder or mouth injury. As a parent, how will you feel when you discover that your teenage child has just lost all of his or her front teeth and must wear false teeth for the rest of his or her life because the school bus didn’t have seat belts installed in it.

At forty miles an hour, a sudden stop could result in three crashes. The first is the bus crashing into an embankment. The second is your child’s head crashing into a metal hand grip and the third crash is when the frontal part of your child’s brain crashes into the front part of your child’s skull, thereby causing permanent brain damage or death. All of this because your child’s school bus didn’t have seatbelts.

On May 12, 2004, a school bus in southeast Edmonton, Alberta rolled in a crash after colliding with a sport utility vehicle. The SUV struck the bus at about 60 kilometers an hour. None of the students were hurt because they were all wearing seatbelts. Unfortunately, many school buses in Alberta are not equipped with seatbelts.

This is not to say that wearing seatbelts will protect passengers in school busses from any injuries. For example, on January 26, 2004 in New Brunswick, a Franklin Board of Education school bus carrying three children and an aide, crashed into the back of a snowplow on Route 27. The injuries were minor. The children had no bruises and no broken bones. Everyone in the bus was wearing a seatbelt.

Today, only a handful of U.S. jurisdictions mandate seat belts on school buses, including New York and New Jersey. California is the only U.S. state to mandate three-point shoulder belts, much like those in a car.

Transport Canada, meanwhile, said it is already looking at ways to improve school busses. The government is looking at the foam used in the seats to see if that can be improved as well as testing to see if the seat design itself can be modified "to hold a child better, especially in the case of a side-impact crash

Alan Ross, a Connecticut doctor who heads the non-profit National Coalition for School Bus Safety, called it "common sense" to use seat belts and blamed a powerful transportation lobby for keeping them out of buses to save money."Why do they require ... that you buckle up in a car but not a bus? The industry will say the (bus) seats are padded, but so is my dashboard," said Ross, adding his organization has many members from Canada in favour of mandatory three-point shoulder belts.

The manufacturers of school busses say that the seats on school buses are packed tightly together and have padded backs so that passengers are "compartmentalized" in a crash, with the seat in front cushioning the forward impact. Unfortunately, if a child is propelled forward at 60 miles and hour and hits the padded back of the seat ahead of him, the padding won’t prevent him from getting a broken neck or losing his teeth on the metal handgrip ahead of him or stop the broken glass from his glasses piercing his eyeballs.

The question that comes to the fore is, what kind of seat belts should be installed in school busses?

Let me say from the onset, lap belts are out. Lap belts have been shown to worsen children's injuries in school bus accidents such as serious neck injuries and abdominal injuries among young passengers in severe frontal crashes. Worse yet, many of the smaller children may not be able to extricate themselves from their lap belts in an overturned bus and if the bus catches fire, the result can be devastating.

For example, on Apr 16, 2007 a bus collided with a tractor-trailer near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico across from El Paso, Texas. The truck's gas tank exploded, engulfing the bus in flames. As many as 28 passengers died in the flames and 21 passengers were injured. Of course, none of them had seatbelts but if the 21 who were injured were seat-belted in, would they have been able to escape, especially if their arms were broken? Would any six-year-old children escape such an accident if they had lap belts holding them close to their seats?

In my opinion, the kind of seatbelts that should be installed are shoulder harnesses. A child would sit between two straps and grab them with both hands and cross them in front of him or her and then let go of the straps. In a frontal collision, the child would be restrained from being propelled forward and once the bus is stationary, the child could slide from the harness, especially if there was a release that would detach the harness from the seat seconds after the bus became stationary.

Admittedly, this could cost two or three thousand dollars per bus but it would be worth it if is saves one child from dying in a school bus crash. The money for such harnesses can be realized from having the parents pay a small increase on their school taxes or adding a surcharge on penalties awarded to highway traffic offenders.

When a child dies needlessly, not only do the parents, siblings, relatives and friends suffer but so do the rest of us. We will never know if the child who dies in a school bus accident because he or she wasn’t seat-belted in the bus might have later become a world-renown inventor, scientist, composer, or religious leader.