Stirring the Pot:
Is 'Middle Loading' Still Important?

By Jim Ellis,
Special to School Transportation News

Sorry, but arguments for or against safety measures based on computations of "student lives saved per dollar spent" have always left me cold.

First of all, the sample size (student school bus fatalities), upon which projections are based, is so (blessedly) limited that drawing firm conclusions about the likely impact of various safety measures has always struck me as suspect. Secondly, comparisons of cost-effectiveness often don't sufficiently factor student injuries into the equation, only fatalities. This is understandable, because student injury data is inconsistently gathered - and that's putting it nicely - in our industry. Claims for or against a particular safety measure based on purported student injury data should be taken with a grain of salt.

But what really bothers me about arguing safety based on the cost-effectiveness criteria is that there are lots of things we could be doing but aren't to improve safety for no additional cost whatsoever. For instance, keeping children out of the rear seats unless the bus is filled to capacity is a simple and effective way to improve safety, especially on buses traveling certain types of routes.

Many moons ago, NHTSA recommended keeping students out of the rear seats when possible. In recent years it has backed off that recommendation, based on the belief that seating position is a random factor in student injury exposure. But to me the jury's still out on the relationship between student injury and seating position. The injury data I've seen offered as support of the random hypothesis aren't convincing.

In my experience, the connection between type of route and student injury exposure is key, and is not in the least random. Most serious student injuries I've seen have occurred on buses traveling on high speed roads (i.e., over 40 mph), such as two-lane rural highways. Many happen in one particular type of accident: another vehicle striking the back of the bus, which was stopped in the act of picking up or dropping off students. As you know, small passenger vehicles typically under ride the bus in such incidents, leaving the passenger compartment unscathed. Serious injuries to students on board are thankfully rare when it's a small vehicle striking the bus.

But if it's a large commercial vehicle, the results can be horrifyingly different. One of the most common scenarios resulting in serious student injuries occur is a truck striking the back of the stopped bus.

Sometimes we need to step back a bit and remind ourselves of what a weird thing it is that school buses do: stopping in the middle of the road to load and unload young children. Yipes! It's a really scary thing when you let yourself think about it. It's done safely millions of time a day, so we take it for granted. But even with all our conspicuity - distinctive color, flashing lights, strobes, stop signs, reflective tape, etc. - vehicles crashing into stopped buses is one of the most common types of school bus accidents. And in today's frantic-paced, congested, aggressive traffic environment, we aren't likely to see the frequency of this type of accident diminish anytime soon.

Some say it's impossible to keep kids out of the rear seats, but many bus drivers do it everyday. Like teaching students how to cross the road safely, bus drivers who work hard at it can convince students to keep the rear rows empty until the bus is filled to capacity. As they say, it's not rocket science.

I see too many partially-filled school buses driving around with most students gathered in the back. It makes every bit of sense to keep students out of the rear seats whenever possible on high speed roads. This is a safety problem our industry can and should solve on its own right now, with no additional expense and without any agonizing about where to allocate precious safety dollars.

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.

Source: School Transportation News, August 2005. All rights reserved.