Since school transportation is primarily involved with safety, and more specifically the safety of children, it is a highly regulated field. In this section user will find information about how the federal government exercises it regulatory power over the industry. Regulations start long before a single yellow school bus hits the road.

Indeed, regulations typically begin with what the federal government refers to as Notices of Proposed Rulemaking, or even as Advanced Notices of Proposed Rulemaking. NPRMs are the method by which the federal government informs citizens that new federal regulations are in the development stage. By law, NPRM's must be published in the daily Federal Register and remain open for comment from the public for several months. Sometimes they are formally enacted and become the law of the land, other times they are rejected altogether. Some proposed regulations transit the rulemaking process in a matter of months, others take a decade or more. Here, users will find links to the current crop of proposed rules that may govern school buses and school transportation.

An NPRM is the method the federal government uses to notify citizens that new federal regulations are being proposed. NPRMs are first published in the daily federal register, and then the public is given a chance to comment on the proposal. Anyone may comment. Here, users will find the current crop of proposed rules that may one day apply to school buses and school transportation.

With the advent of the Internet, the federal government has also begun to place information about its activities on the Internet, including proposed new regulations. A particularly useful feature of the government's efforts to communicate with the public is the U.S. Department of Transportation's Electronic Document Management System. The EDMS is an electronic, image-based database in which all DOT docketed information is stored for easy research, and retrieval. The EDMS is the most direct and immediate method by which any citizen may comment on any regulatory proposal by any modal agency in the U.S. DOT.