It's tragic anytime a student dies on a school bus or outside of one. Most often fatalities and even injuries can and should be avoided in crashes similar to that between an Autumn Transportation school bus and a teen driver on Jan. 21 for any number of reasons. The obvious one in this case is if only Parikh had been wearing a seat belt. Proponents of Rep. Tony Guerra's bill to require three-point lap/shoulder belts on school buses say Parikh would never had become airborne and suffered the fatal head injury had he been properly restrained.

But the what ifs continue.

If only proper procedure had been followed, such as the company re-certifying a vehicle that had previously been taken out of service due to brake problems...

If only the bus driver had been properly certified to drive a vehicle as large as that particular Type C bus, and he if only he wasn't (allegedly) driving 80 mph when he was supposed to be going no faster than 50 mph...

If only a guardrail had properly kept the school bus from plunging off the highway and down a 20-foot embankment...

If only the teen driver who collided with the bus had been riding with his classmates to the robotics competition instead of taking his own car...

Maybe Parikh would be alive today if any of the above statements were true. But there remain far too many additional challenges that arise from the logic that the only viable response is equipping all Connecticut school buses with lap/shoulder restraints in response to the state's first student fatality occurring in a school bus since 1972. In a perfect world with endless pots of money, I, personally, would advocate for the restraint systems in school buses to ensure they are absolutely without a doubt, perceived or in reality, the safest mode of road transportation there is. The safety record speaks for itself, as only about six students die on board school buses each year compared to more than 300 in other vehicles while on their way to or from school.

Of course, Parikh died on his way to a school competition, but does that mean we must ignore the facts? Now, if Connecticut voters approved a bond measure that would pay for installing three-point systems in all new school buses (or retrofitting all school buses as some would have it), I'd say go for it. But is that realistic in this economy? STN obtained some figures on just how much it might cost, around $15,000 per bus to install the belts. That's a conservative estimate, mind you, as others have said the real cost would be more in the neighborhood of $20,000. But then, you must balance that against a lawsuit, at least one of which has already been filed against the school district, bus company and the teen driver.

Some data reported by a local newspaper and attributed to School Transportation News, meanwhile, has caused some heartburn among legislators who are debating the bill. The Hartford Courant quoted STN, and presumably an item on our School Bus FAQs Web page, that it would only cost about $1,500 to $2,000 per bus to install seat belts. But, in actuality, our Web site cites older data on what it might cost to install two-point lap belts on school buses, and in the same section it goes on to say that three-point lap/shoulders systems would be more expensive. Even with the lap belt data, we show that installing the systems nationwide could range from $450 million to $900 million dollars, and that doesn't factor in the maintenance costs. No writer from the Courant ever contacted us, or we would have gladly explained.

Perhaps some of the blame needs to be pointed at STN. It's extremely difficult in this industry to get one's hands on any cold-hard facts, especially us in the media. There's the challenge of 50 different states and D.C. administering their own operations, albeit in many similar ways. But there are seemingly as many funding or reimbursement formulas as stars in the sky. And costs, true costs, can be nearly impossible to come by as they not only vary state to state but district to district. The American School Bus Council knows full well the limitations to the industry of having limited data, which is why a major objective this year is to attempt to develop a centralized database of school bus law and other data. Still, we at STN and the entire industry must do better.

This all, of course, can only serve to further blur the whole school bus seat belt issue. Try explaining the foggy nuances to grieving parents, like Pratik and Dolly Parikh. They don't want to hear about how safe school buses are when they just lost their boy. They don't care about school bus under floors and the need for and additional costs of adding stronger anchorages for seat belts. They don't care that a tractor trailer crashed through the same I-84 guardrail just yards away from where their son's school bus crashed. They don't care about the very rational argument that public funds could be better spent on increased driver training, both for school bus drivers and teen students, as well as better highway engineering, vehicle crash avoidance technologies, and so on and so forth.

The Parikhs and parents all across the nation just want the facts, which are all all too hard to come by.