Indiana Study Backs the 'Voluntary' in Lap/Shoulder Belts

AUSTIN, Texas - As the nation braces for possibly more state school bus 3-point lap/shoulder belt bills, state departments of pupil transportation are measuring sticks for the potential cost of the occupant restraints.

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt announced in August that he would work with legislators there to write and pass a law requiring the 3-point restraints on all state school buses, no matter the cost. Tom Quinn, director of school governance at the Missouri Department of Education, estimated that it would cost an average of $8,500 per bus to install lap/shoulder belts. The federal government uses a figure closer to $7,500.

Meanwhile, John Green, California state director of pupil transportation, reported that the California Highway Patrol requires lap/shoulder belts on all currently unsold school buses that were parked in a vehicle yard prior to July 1 of last year, the compliance date for all newly sold school buses in the state to be equipped with the occupant restraints.

Pete Baxter took notice. Indiana's state director of school transportation commissioned a study last year in hopes it would provide a formula for calculating an exact cost to the state and to the 294 public schools systems for implementing the restraints.

"Our point in this was to be proactive," Baxter said. "If the question ever comes up in legislation, we have more than a supposition."

His associates were briefed at the annual NASDPTS conference in October on an Indiana State University study conducted for the Indiana Department of Education that basically finds what pupil transporters have been saying all along: only individual school districts can decide if lap/shoulder belts make sense and are feasible.

"Americans do not assess risk very well. We'll continue to poison ourselves with refined sugar, but here we are spending all this money to protect kids when they don't necessarily need to be protected," said Thomas Steiger, an associate professor at Indiana State and director of the school's Sociology Research Lab. "Maybe we should fill the bus with JELL-O."

Ironically, a school bus safety task force called by Gov. Blunt last spring in response to several high-profile school bus accidents that killed other motorists and severely injured several students made that same recommendation, only to see Blunt call for a bill in Jefferson City.

NHTSA and the NTSB have long said compartmentalization, namely high, padded seat backs and the school bus roll cage, provides adequate protection to student passengers in the event of a crash. Lately, the industry has called for a better understanding of how 3-point belts may affect the school bus seating capacity. The common belief is that the seat belts would require 3-2 bench seating, thus reducing the in-use seating capacity by one-third and resulting in the need for school systems to increase fleet sizes by 33 percent.

But Steiger found it was not that easy. The design capacity listed by the manufacturer is easy to find, but the real problem was reporting the actual in-use capacity, or real number of passengers who can be seated in any given bus. That number varies on the type of route and age of students.

"I was under the impression that Indiana had a state guideline that you'd basically put three elementary students to a 39-inch seat and two for middle school and high school," said Steiger, who admitted his school bus learning curve was dynamic. "But some seats are 32 inches. Some states have a guideline but Indiana does not. The emergent standard is very much in variance in Indiana. Results are not going to be generalize-able."

There were some bus routes where it was clear there were four people per seat, whereas others had only two. And that fails to factor in a trend toward full-day kindergarten classes. Complicating matters was that, of the state's 6,200 school bus routes, 2,300 had to be immediately thrown out because ridership numbers supplied by the school systems contained obvious errors or couldn't be validated, Steiger added. In the end, the study found that 34.3 percent of reported bus routes were filled to capacity, and that an average of 63 percent of schools needed at least 24 more seats per bus to meet 3-point seat belt requirements.

Perhaps the only in-use study exists in North Carolina. Jeff Tsai, school transportation director at the Institute for Transportation Research in Raleigh, N.C., told NASDPTS members that lap/shoulder belt research conducted in the year 2000 shows that parents were generally positive (56 percent) about the occupant restraints on their children's buses, and 50 to 75 percent of elementary students reported using the belts. Principals reported that the occupant restraints resulted in improved student behavior. Meanwhile, virtually zero percent of middle and high school students buckled up reflecting a trend of lower ridership figures as students get older.