- This equals about 11 billion individual student rides, or 22 billion boardings and deboardings, annually, when you include the national estimate for Head Start transportation, summer school and child care transportation.
- School buses travel approximately 4.3 billion miles each school year across the United States. To put this in perspective, the U.S. Department of Transportation said Americans drove nearly 3
trillion miles on U.S. highways in 2005.
- Approximately 54 percent of all K-12 students in the country ride yellow school buses.
- America
spends an average of $520 per regular ed child for transportation
annually;
- America
spends an average of $2,400 per special needs child for transportation
annually.
- Nearly 48,000 school buses were manufactured during the 12 months
of the 2005-06 school year.
- 350
pupil transportation delegates are appointed by the chief school
officer in each state meet for a week-long conference once every
five years to review and rewrite minimum standards and specifications
for safe operation. The next National Congress on School Transportation is scheduled for May 2010 at the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg, Mo.
- Three-point
lap/shoulder occupant restraint systems are required by federal regulation on all newly manufactured
small school buses under 10,000 lbs., but only seven states mandate their use. As a matter of practice, however, all manufacturers of small school buses install lap/shoulder belt occupant restraint systems on their buses.
- Three
states -- New York, New Jersey and Florida -- currently require two-point
lap belts on large school buses over 10,000 lbs.
-
New
Jersey not only requires lap belt installation on new large school
buses, students are required to use them. In New York, use is only
required if the local school district adopts a policy mandating
their use. At last count, about 25 of the 725 districts in the state have done
so.
- A law requiring lap belts is also active in Louisiana, but there has yet to be any appropriated funding for the restraint systems.
- California is currently the only state in the nation to require three-point lap shoulder belt occupant restraint systems on large school buses. It also requires three-point lap shoulder belt occupant restraint systems on small school buses.
- Great
Britain requires lap belts on minivans used in youth transport,
including school transport. The
European Union has begun to require that coaches and minivans in member states be equipped
with occupant restraint systems.
- According to the National Safety Council, the
national school bus accident rate is 0.01 per 100 million miles
traveled, compared to 0.04 for trains, 0.06 for commercial aviation and 0.96 for other passenger vehicles.
- Therefore, the federal government considers school buses to be about nine times safer that other passenger vehicles during the normal school commute.
- The
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that 96 percent
of the estimated 8,500 to 12,000 children injured in school bus
accidents annually are considered minor (scrapes, bumps, bruises,
etc.).
- NHTSA
calculated that 4 percent of the school bus-related injuries to children
-- about 350 to 475 annually -- are serious (i.e. broken bones or
worse) based on the medical community's widely accepted AIS or Abbreviated
Injury Scale.
- An average of six children are fatally injured inside school buses
annually.
- About
16 children are fatally injured as pedestrians in the loading & unloading zone around school buses annually. That's
better than 200 percent improvement from 75 school bus fatalities in 1975;
it is still not good enough.
- During the seven years between 1989 and 1996, 9,500 school-age children were killed during school hours while riding in all kinds of motor vehicles.
The federal government considers school buses to be about nine times safer that other passenger vehicles during the normal school commute.
- According to data gathered for NHTSA's Fatal Analysis Reporting System, about 600 school age children are killed annually riding to and from school in motor vehicles other than school buses. These fatalities occur during school transport hours (7 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 5 p.m.), on school days (Monday through Friday) only, and during the typical 180 day school year, to children riding to and from school, mostly in automobiles.
