WASHINGTON, D.C. — The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) voted to add school bus occupant safety to its annual list of “Most Wanted” safety recommendations, classifying the recommendation as “Yellow,” an indication that current efforts are acceptable but progressing slowly.

The proposal, labeled “Enhanced Protection for School Bus Passengers,” requires The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to develop within the next two years performance standards for school bus occupant protection systems that account for varied accident scenarios. Once developed, newly manufactured school buses will be required to have protection systems that meet these standards.

Issuing the suggestion, member Deborah Hersman on Nov. 14 cited the recently-released American Academy of Pediatrics study that extrapolated more than three-times as many total school bus injuries occur annually than previous federal reports had found (see page XX). She also noted that, while she was aware of the safe record of school buses and the limited number of school bus fatalities, NHTSA has failed to meet its own 2002 pledge before Congress to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) for voluntarily installed seat belts, higher seat backs and a requirement for lap-shoulder belt restraint systems on smaller buses.

“Four years later we are still waiting,” Hersman said. “The rule making hasn’t been issued, and during those four years an additional 32,000 children, if you use NHTSA’s numbers, have been injured.”

Adding the recommendation to the “Most Wanted List” would encourage NHTSA to expedite the implementation of safety policies, she added.

Joe Osterman, director of the NTSB Office of Highway Safety, confirmed that NHTSA efforts to update the 30-year-old standards in school bus safety had “ground to a halt.”

While others agreed that an update was overdue, they noted some of the nuanced difficulties of school bus safety.

Dr. Kristin Poland, who is not a member of the NTSB but who co-authored a key report on school bus safety in 1999 and again in 2006, suggested that, while school buses could be improved in the areas of vehicle rollovers and side impact collisions, current front-impact protection is “very good” and school buses are “very safe.”
Dr. Mitch Gerber, NTSB’s medical officer, noted the unique difficulty of designing and implementing a uniform system of active restraint for school buses

“(School buses) must protect everyone from the fifth percentile 5-year-old to the 95th percentile 18-year-old … (this) makes it very difficult to design a restraint system that will work for all circumstances and an be implemented,” he said.
Even if designed properly, active restraint systems create the added difficulty of insuring that all pupils used the system properly, a dilemma he characterized as “almost insurmountable.”

“The change cannot be done easily without potentially increasing the risk to occupants,” he said.

Responding to Hersman’s suggestion, board member and NTSB Office of Highway Safety Director Bruce Magladry said he expects an NHTSA NPRM for lap-shoulder belt restraints to be issued later this year.

“It’s a promise,” he said.