The head of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has spoken: "The position of the NHTSA is that seatbelts save lives. That is true whether in a passenger car or in a big yellow bus."
Ah yes, the big yellow school bus, the last bastion of the belt-free bench seat. And why is this exactly? Why don't your kids have to wear a seatbelt when they ride the bus to school?
Consider the rules for placing a child in a normal passenger car. Current regulations require proper infant and child seats, and booster seats for older children; not only do the recommended maximum weight and height for moving to the next stage of seating keep moving ever upward, but you're now not supposed to put a child in the front seat until they're practically in their teens. Soon, you'll be trying to latch your mid-30s daughter next to her baby in the back of the family minivan.
Not in the school bus though - just load 'em up and yell over the intercom trying to get 'em to sit facing forward. The simple answer as to why? School buses just don't seem to get in accidents. The kids, as it turns out, are alright. As a kid who grew up in rural British Columbia, I took the bus to school all through my tender youth. It was a formative part of the experience: the waiting around, the long trip to the family driveway, the social strata of seating position (cool kids in back, youngsters up front), the small battles waged daily with those you didn't like and those you did.
The bus was a microcosm of the whole educational experience, perhaps not the instructional part, but certainly the social aspect. Kids made fun of each other out of those sliding rear windows, kicked each other as they walked down the aisle, flung spitballs, and basically behaved like the Lord of The Flies on wheels. My first bus driver, Bruce, tolerated none of this, and would frequently screech to a halt to hand out frontier justice. Later, the myopic Paul took the wheel, and it was basically every kid for him or herself. The school bus is an older construct than you think. In the very early days, they were called kid hacks (sounds like a parenting blog), and were little more than tarp-covered wagons. Largely horse-drawn, they'd haul the kids in from the surrounding farms to the one-room schoolhouse, and then back again. The first properly dedicated buses started showing up in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but these were again fairly specialized equipment. It wouldn't be until 1939 that a University of Manhattan conference would set out the rules for what constituted a suitable transportation device for ferrying our children around.
Along with setting out guidelines for seating arrangements and the like, the main lasting result of this conference was the standardization of school bus yellow as the colour all buses would be painted. The colour was original called national school bus chrome, and by the mid-1970s, every single school bus was painted this familiar, cheery colour.
Surprisingly little changed over the intervening several decades in school bus production. Most of the safety improvements involved stiffer body production, and a reduction in the number of body panel joins. Beyond that, the only major adaptations of the school bus have been the widespread adoption of the automatic transmission, and a passenger detection system to alert if a child is left behind on a bus after its rounds are completed.
Part of the reason for the constancy is that the major impetus for the school bus has already come and passed. During the post-war period, the combination of the baby boom and the growth of suburban living created huge demand for transport to schools. Companies boomed and then busted as the baby boom faded.
In Canada, we're left with just a single school bus manufacturer, Girardin Minibus of Drummondville, Que. They build the smaller, compact buses used by the Bluebird bus company, while pretty much all the larger buses used in Canada are built in the United States.
Smaller buses must use seatbelts, but larger ones don't have to, and haven't for ages. These bigger buses also don't have safety extras like blind spot monitoring, cross-traffic assist, or even backup cameras. They've got blinking red lights, and a stop sign that folds out from the side, and that's pretty much it. But it seems to be enough. According to NHTSA records, over the last decade of travel, school buses accidents through the U.S. have resulted in 83 passenger deaths. One would be too many, of course, but when you compare that to national averages in the tens of thousands of fatalities, it's much less. Put simply, people don't crash into school buses because they're big, yellow, and we know they're full of kids. We drive more safely and slowly around them, they're easy to spot, and there's something to be said for having a greater mass and ride height than most other traffic on the road.
The thing to do, naturally, is paint your minivan bright yellow. But there's some question as to whether putting three-point belts in school buses will actually increase safety, or merely add complexity and cost. After all, an improperly fastened seatbelt isn't necessarily better than no belt at all, and it's unreasonable to expect a bus driver to go around ensuring every child is securely belted in.
However, the NHTSA hath spoken, and so it shall eventually be. It's hard to imagine a world where you can't turn around in your seat to trade lunches before school, or cluster around the one kid who brought a Gameboy (in modern parlance, that'd be an iPad). Even so, the wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, and kids don't know how good they've got it, not having to walk to school, uphill both ways, always in a snow storm.
Brendan McAleer is a freelance writer and automotive enthusiast. If you have a suggestion for a column, or would be interested in having your car club featured, please contact him at [email protected]. Follow Brendan on Twitter: @brendan_mcaleer.
