Can We Go Backward?

By Jim Ellis, Special to School Transportation News

I've recently been struck by how pessimistic some of my friends have become about the future of school transportation safety. Unfortunately this includes people whose opinions I highly respect - people I look to as mentors in this industry.

I hear a startling degree of exasperation and worry from transportation people today. Exasperation with what often feels like inertia from government agencies on critical safety issues. Worry that we won't be able to maintain the safety record we've all worked so hard to achieve.

Many of us have been lucky enough to live through an incredible era in safety advances in our industry. Anyone with a drawer full of school bus T-shirts should feel deeply proud of what we've achieved over the past generation. The improvements in school bus safety since the 1970s - to which so many have contributed - are truly magisterial. If children had continued to die in school bus accidents at the 1975 fatality rate, literally thousands more children would have perished over the past 30 years. School bus safety is one of the great success stories of modern-day America.

It's probably just human nature that we've come to expect this constant incremental improvement in safety to continue. But current safety standards are not written in stone. Fatalities can increase as well as decrease. That very phenomenon has occurred in other transportation modes in recent years.

Of course, no one knows what the future will bring to our industry or to the children and communities we serve. We live in uncertain times. And my crystal ball has always been a little cloudy. I am a perennial optimist about safety (those who have known me for a while might suggest another adjective for "perennial," like "naive," or "dumb," but that's another story). I've had the privilege of seeing so many examples of successful safety programs in the field. I know what the pupil transportation community can do when people work hard together for a common goal. But it seems pretty clear that we're entering a tough fiscal era. Even an optimist has to worry about the impact of budget cutbacks on our ability to maintain current safety standards, let alone address new problems. With school districts facing structural fiscal problems, we can anticipate continual efforts to roll back safety budgets. A high level of safety takes money (most of the time, anyway - volunteerism and mutual aide are also big factors in the safety record we have today).

Already, the fuel cost spike has led some school districts to start combining sports trips. It's natural enough that districts would consider this in today's budgetary climate. But does that make it a safe practice? You don't have to be a NHTSA engineer to realize trying to squeeze three high school kids into one bus seat is unsafe.

The ability to replace aging buses, or to send staff to safety conferences, are also taking their hits. The long-term ramifications of such short-term savings are worrisome.

But it's the eventual impact on training that most worries me. I'm a trainer, and I believe preventing accidents requires a constant flow of critical safety information to drivers and students.

If I had to identify the main reason for our industry's success in improving safety over the past generation it would be a willingness - no, desire - to learn from our mistakes. When a tragedy occurs in our industry, our impulse is not to circle the wagons or deny there's a problem. In most cases we discuss the causes of an accident with remarkable honesty. This commitment to learn everything we can to prevent similar accidents in the future sets us part from other transportation modes.
But if budget pressures erode our ability to disseminate current safety information to drivers, we are in trouble. In my experience, maintaining a high level of safety awareness in an operation is like trying to keep a balloon with a pinhole leak inflated. If you stop blowing, the balloon quickly shrivels.

Safety innovations usually come from the field - not from government agencies or safety institutes, and definitely not politicians. Similarly, the battle to maintain high safety standards will probably be fought out in the trenches. Transportation supervisors are very likely to see many shortsighted cost-saving proposals from business officials in the months ahead. Are we prepared to professionally and effectively defend the safety position?