for or against?

My community doesn't even offer busing anymore, and the school dept. takes over 70% of the budget. But, to answer the question, for. On the condition they change the seating materials to non-flammable. Do you have any idea how quickly an ordinary schoolbus could become fully involved? It's frightening...

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wolfcry911
My community doesn't even offer busing anymore, and the school dept. takes over 70% of the budget. But, to answer the question, for. On the condition they change the seating materials to non-flammable. Do you have any idea how quickly an ordinary schoolbus could become fully involved? It's frightening...

The seat material is non-flammable, and GM fixed the fuel tanks a long time ago.
But to answer the question, no seatbelts.
Until the parents ride with their kids, and discipline them, seatbelts will only be weapons.

BGnR

If it means retrofitting a bunch of busses, then the money is best spent elsewhere. If it is for new busses, sure. That said, the number of schoolchildren that die each year in bus crashes (or are severely injured) is on the order of the number of children who die by accidentally inhaling gumballs (i.e., very few), so I'd spend the money on other more important things.

-Tofer

If you Google school busses and safety, they're shown to be one of the safest forms of transportation, even without seatbelts. Part of the reason is due to the way busses are constructed and the way the vehicle itself "behaves" during a collision, which is much different than regular passenger vehicles because of their size and weight. I certainly wouldn't support spending money to retrofit older busses, and I'm not sure I'd support having them included in new busses, either.

Against, for the reasons discussed above. Note also that school buses and city buses are 'more safe' because they move very slowly, on average. Most school bus usage is local, then never get on a highway, etc.

Have you ever watched how kids are packed onto a school bus? In my school district, the little kids have to sit three to a seat, and belts are not designed to accommodate that.

i say : new ones built with them. don't retrofit. plastic buckles... no more dangerous than, say, a sharpened pencil or metal ruler.

Why do you think this is a matter of opinion? Whether to use seatbelts or not should be based on analysis of accident statistics to determine whether seatbelts are effective in this application, not what a bunch of non-experts "think".

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"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." (1987) -- Carl Sagan

are school buses rarely go over 50 or so in the straightaway.

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It's not a collision I worry about, but when buses roll over. They were showing footage from the video camera mounted inside a school bus a while back during a roll over and the kids just went flying through the air.

jesse

My dad ran busses for several school districts in several states. In several states he worked directly with state and local officials regarding school bus safety. He once told me that the number of injuries and deaths that occurred with seat belts was higher than with the busses that didn't have them.

He took over one district shortly after they instituted the use of seat belts. He used them for about a year and the number of injuries drastically increased. The majority of the time that seat belts were used, they were not to secure a student to the seat but to tie up, strangle, trip, beat, whip... other students.

They then removed the seat belts from all of the busses.

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watch the kid in the back (right side)
[www.sccs.swarthmore.edu]

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incognegro
watch the kid in the back (right side)
[www.sccs.swarthmore.edu]

Yep, that's because it's a long bus and the student was sitting in the far back. The driver hit a bump too fast. Sure a seat belt would have helped in that one situation, but there are far more situations where they cause more harm than good.

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