Showing No Restraint for Lap/Shoulder Belt Opponents

By Jim Ellis, Special to School Transportation News

For the sake of discussion, here's why I'm in favor of lap/shoulder belts on school buses. 

As I see it, lap/shoulder belts are inevitable, anyway, but I suspect our industry's attitude towards them will have a huge impact on how they eventually wind up being implemented.  As an industry, can't we "un-circle" our wagons just a bit and admit that, from a national public health perspective, it just doesn't make sense that children don't use restraints on school buses? I strongly believe our industry can and should play a significant role in reinforcing restraint use in mom and dad's car.  The opportunity to reinforce restraint use with the 24 million children who use school buses every day should not be casually dismissed; hundreds of children die or are seriously injured every year in this country because moms and dads didn't make them buckle up.

I believe lap/shoulder belts can improve student safety in three significant ways:

First, I think lap/shoulder belts will reduce passenger injuries by "keeping passengers in their seats," as NHTSA put it.  (I chuckle when I hear people refer to compartmentalization as a "passive" restraint system - evidently they haven't ridden on a loaded school bus for a while. Keeping kids in the compartments is hardly a passive task.)

Reducing injuries may not seem as earth-shattering a goal as reducing fatalities, but even minor injuries can have major consequences in pupil transportation.  Reducing injuries even 10 or 20 percent would have a significant, positive impact on our industry, including a financial one.

I should mention here, as I've mentioned in previous columns, that in my opinion student injury data in our industry is extremely suspect. State methodologies for collecting data vary widely; reporting compliance is dubious and there is every reason to believe injuries are under-reported.  For instance, one study showed that over half of all school bus accidents went unreported to the New York State Education Department.  And data is no more credible at a federal level - look at the injury tables included in the 2002 federal "Crashworthiness" study, for instance.  Some of their attempts to explain the curious leaps in data from year to year in their tables are priceless: "There has been a wide variation in the number of injured persons in frontal crashes, with the estimate ranging from zero for years 1993 through 1996 to nearly 6,000 in 1992."  A wide variation, indeed.

A second reason I believe in lap/shoulder restraints is better protection of children in rollovers.  Children are more vulnerable to serious injury or death in a rollover than in a frontal collision.  Rollovers are not as uncommon as some seem to think.  Ejections in rollovers are rarer but do occur, and are often lethal. Last month, a school bus flipped over at a high rate of speed on an interstate highway in metropolitan New York City.  The children, who all attended a private school, were wearing restraints and their injuries were minor. But it's not hard to imagine a very different outcome if they'd been unrestrained, as occurred in 1996 in Arizona.

There, a conventional school bus with the Flagstaff Unified School District rolled when the driver reached for a can of Coke and lost control. Five youngsters were ejected, one becoming a quadriplegic and one a paraplegic.

The third potential safety benefit gets remarkably little attention - barely a passing mention in most studies and position papers - but might wind up being the most important in the long run: reducing driver distraction by improving student behavior. The lack of attention to this issue is very odd, since the No. 1 concern of most bus drivers and supervisors is student management, as indicated on survey after survey.  In my experience, driver distraction because of on-board behavior problems is one of the most common causes of school bus accidents and fatalities. 

Can restraint use make that much of a difference in student behavior? Yes. I've seen it. Of course they're not a panacea, but restraints contribute to a more orderly and controlled passenger environment.  Sometimes what we expect our drivers to put up with amazes me - kids moving from seat to seat as the bus is moving, occasionally getting into mischief, as though that's just how it is on a school bus. The potential for distraction is high, and the accident record shows it.  As I see it, lap/shoulder restraints are not just a crashworthiness measure, but a crash avoidance measure as well. I think they can be a great tool for bus drivers.

Cost is an issue with lap/shoulder restraints, of course. It is apparent to me that the cost of lap/shoulder systems should be underwritten by the federal government, not state or local governments. Increasing child restraint use is a national goal, and as I see it the financial burden of equipping school buses with restraints should be shouldered by our society as a whole. It makes no sense that our national transit industry is so heavily subsidized with federal dollars while school bus safety initiatives are wholly dependent on local funding. 

But the hypothesis that the increased cost of buses might mean fewer children riding buses seems a little disingenuous to me. Everything we do in pupil transportation costs something. The price of school buses has risen steadily in recent years as new technologies and features are incorporated. Operational costs have risen just as steadily. Yet I don't see fewer kids riding buses because of the added cost of anti-lock braking systems or drug/alcohol testing.

In my opinion, the argument that lap/shoulder-equipped school buses will wind up transporting fewer students, due to their reduced capacity when moving from a 3-3 to a 3-2 seating configuration, has also been overstated.  First of all, 13 inches per seat school bus capacity ratings have been unrealistic for a long time, working correctly only with very small children. Prudent districts take student size into account when routing buses (as NHTSA has advised for years) and don't try to cram three middle school or high school students into a 39-inch seat.  Transporters who ignore this common-sense but non-mandated capacity limitation worry me on several counts. Kids sitting half in the aisle are vulnerable to injury even in a sudden stop, and the gross vehicle weigh rating of the bus may be exceeded since older students seldom weigh a paltry 120 pounds each anymore. I worry that the greater weight and higher center of gravity of an overloaded bus could make it much easier for the bus to "trip and roll," especially at highway speeds. 

As school districts attempt to combine teams on sports trips due to high fuel costs, exceeding adult capacity ratings seems very dangerous to me. 

As we transition to lap-shoulder equipped buses, I implore you; don't do what we did in good old New York a generation ago with lap belts.  Don't put restraints on buses but fail to make kids use them. This spineless compromise led to misuse and abuse of belts by kids, cynicism about them from drivers and supervisors and a big waste of time and money for everyone. 

For many years, most of my friends in the business have been against restraints on school buses because of medical concerns - injuries to young children from lap belts.  At last, lap/shoulder belts have changed the nature of the debate.  Now we have a chance to do it right.

Jim Ellis is the director of Research & Instructional Design at the Pupil Transportation Safety Institute in Syracuse, N.Y. He can be reached via email at jim@ptsi.org.