Greyhound announced that coaches equipped with the new Premier seat by SafeGuard that promises compartmentalization for both restrained and unrestrained passengers are hitting the road.

The Premier comes standard on 140 new Prevost X3-45 coaches assigned to Greyhound’s New York to Montreal and New York to Toronto routes. The company, which is owned by FirstGroup North America, said in a release that additional buses equipped with the Premier seat should begin servicing the New York to Boston route by mid-April. Greyhound also added that it plans to replace the entire nationwide fleet with Premier seats.

The new seat, developed by SafeGuard and American Seating and first unveiled in January during the United Motorcoach Association EXPO in Orlando, Fla., is the first to introduce the concept of compartmentalization to the motorcoach industry. The result, says SafeGuard, is a seat that uses similar technology as its school bus products to protect both passengers who are using seat belts and those who are not.

“SafeGuard was the first to bring lap-shoulder belts to market on school bus seats in 2002, and now SafeGuard bus seats are protecting over 200,000 children in more than 40 states,” said James Johnson, director of sales for the SafeGuard division of IMMI . “The company achieved a lead position in the school bus seating market by offering SmartFrame technology and by certifying seat performance to NHTSA requirements in our crash-test facility.”

The National Transportation Safety Board has identified motorcoach rollovers as having a doubly fatal effect, as passengers traditionally have not been restrained in seat belt systems and the seats, while built for comfort, do not retain their design during a crash like those in school buses. In addition, in historic cases of passengers being thrown from their seats during a crash, they can also be ejected through large, picture windows that can easily separate from the motorcoach.

At this writing, two bills were being debated by Congress on motorcoach seat belts. One bill, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX) is in response to a fatal crash in 2005 of a motorcoach transporting baseball players from Bluffton University in Ohio.