The reason the bus driver has a seat belt and the kids don’t is because the kids have a padded seat back in front of them to stop them from launching forward in a crash. The bus driver has nothing but glass and the open road in front of them to stop them from launching forward in a crash. And seat belts help protect the bus driver from the airbags as they deploy from the steering wheel which have been known to deploy so forcefully that if you’re not wearing a seat belt they can kill you, and even in some extreme circumstances completely decapitate you.
Also as someone else pointed out the kids could get trapped in their seats in the event of a fire. The bus driver has a little seat belt cutting tool available to them, but in a fire they might not have time to cut 72 seat belts to free all of the kids on a big bus.
You might ask, well what if the bus rolls? It’s pretty unlikely that the bus would roll because bus drivers are trained pretty extensively and have to go through periodic medical exams and driving exams to make sure they’re capable of doing the job safely. Even if the bus were in a situation where it might roll, it’s very bottom heavy so it would take quite a lot to get it to tip over.
School bus drivers have more oversight than police huh?
Hair stylists have more oversight than police.
School bus drivers are going under significantly less training and requirements in my affluent DC suburb, since Covid at least.
They don’t get paid shit and they’re privatizing the school busses :(
Other countries have seatbelts on school buses, so it’s not exactly some cut and dry question.
It’s not even the case in all US states.The NTSB recommends that we start enforcing seat belts on school buses.
https://www.ntsb.gov/Advocacy/safety-topics/Pages/schoolbuses.aspxThey agree with what you said, but disagree that the risk of being trapped outweighs the risk of being fired face first into a seat back.
Interesting. I live in southern Ontario and we definitely don’t have seat belts on buses here.
We mostly don’t here in the US, either. It’s not federally required for them to have seat belts, but that may change in the future based off things like the NTSB’s recommendation.
“padded seat back in front”
I haven’t had to take a school bus in 20 years but from what I remember there isn’t much padding over the frame that goes around the back so I wouldn’t want to get that in my face in a crash!
I was a chaperone on a school trip last year, and the bus had about 3" of foam padding over the frame and just vinyl on the seat back. Plus the sides of the bus were just bare aluminum with screws and sharp corners.
Iirc, Mythbuster tried to roll a bus and couldn’t.
What do you mean it’s not capitalism being evil again?
I just want to point out that decapitation, in a medical sense, doesn’t necessarily mean the head is removed from the body. You can be internally decapitated.
Huh, TIL
The fire stuff makes some degree of sense but the “padded seat” thing doesn’t. 1) they aren’t very padded in the back, and 2) by that logic people wouldn’t need to wear seatbelts if they sat in a back seat in any car.
- by that logic people wouldn’t need to wear seatbelts if they sat in a back seat in any car.
That logic is the exact reason in some places it is(was? My info is a few years old.) legal for adults in the back seat to not wear a seat belt. Not saying I agree with the logic, but that actually is the case in some places.
The other advantage of buses is that they have a lot of inertia due to their mass. The most likely thing for them to hit is a car and most likely because that car made a mistake. The bus can easily push a car out of the way without losing too much velocity. The same is not true of your average civilian vehicle.
F = ma
A car crash will affect an obsese 250lb bus driver much more than some 40lb little twerp.
Let’s say the bus was traveling at a rate of 60mph🇺🇸 and hit a brick wall, and all passengers uniformly come to a complete stop at precisely 1 second. The 5 year old weighing 40lbs🇺🇸 would experience an impact of around 109 pounds of force (109.40 lbf🇺🇸) whereas the bus driver weighing 250lbs🇺🇸 would experience 683.67 lbf🇺🇸.
I absolutely did NOT run the calculations in 🤮 🇪🇺 🤮 before converting to 😎🇺🇸😎.
In fact, I think newborns shouldn’t need any restraints at all.
Toss em in the back of the truck on the drive back home from the hospital. They’ll be fine!
I mean, on the other hand, a 5 year old is generally more fragile than an adult man.
Nah. They’re made ot of rubber. They’ll be fine. Anyway, even if they aren’t, it’s not like society invested too much in them yet.
Dude, fully grown men are objectively fragile.
Children are objectively small and squishy. Car accidents are one of the leading causes of death for children for a reason.
High schoolers ride busses too. They’re a little bigger than 40lb twerps at that point.
But they’re objectively the worst kind of child, so meh.
The CBC’s “The Fifth Estate” did a whole show about this.
Makes you wonder why the driver gets a seatbelt when the kids do not.
The back of the seat if front of the students is higher and softer than the steering wheel in front of the driver.
As unfortunate as it sounds, in most accidents kids can’t bounce around much and mostly hit something soft enough to keep injuries minor or at least nonfatal.For a long time the numbers worked out that that was enough for most bus accidents to protect students, and that seatbelt costs would be better spent increasing safety at pickup and dropoff locations and increasing bus ridership numbers, since even without seatbelts a school bus is radically safer than being driven to school or walking in most places.
More recently, the numbers have started to say we should invest in seatbelts and making pedestrian routes to schools safer, since those would now make a more significant impact.
I thought it was because buses were such tanks that any crash with another moving vehicle would be insignificant to the childrens
I LOVE statistics (78% of the time)! 😃📊
