Should School Buses Have Seat Belts?

School buses are much safer than other vehicles on the road, statistically speaking, but they'd be even safer with seat belts. Learn why they haven't traditionally had them, and how that might change, in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bam here just to give you a heads up.
Today's episode involves super not graphic discussions of school kids
and car crashes. It's about how laws might prevent injury,
but go on and skip it if you want to.
So in general, parents and lawmakers alike seem pretty okay

(00:24):
with letting children hop on school buses every day without
giving too much thought to the fact that those same
kids would be firmly buckled up if they were riding
in a car. In fact, for many of the younger,
smaller kids, even regular seat belts wouldn't be sufficient in
a car that have to have the additional protection of
a car seat or booster seat. So why this disparity
when it comes to school bus safety? Who decided that

(00:46):
school buses don't need seatbelts? And is it even true?
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or n h T
s A, which tracks traffic and safety data, is one
organization that has historically advocated that seat belts are not
necessary on school buses, because the organization says, the school
bus is the safest vehicle on the road. N h

(01:08):
T s A points to data showing that in a
ten year span from two thousand eighteen, a very small
percentage of total road accidents and deaths occurred involving school transportation.
School buses are designed for good crash and rollover protection.
They protect kids through compartmentalization, which means spacing seats close together,

(01:28):
as well as using seats with high energy absorbing backs
to prevent children from being tossed around in case of
a collision. School buses are also highly visible and have
safety features like flashing red lights, crossview mirrors, and stop
sign arms. Drivers stay on carefully planned routes and maintain
slow speeds. Unfortunately, though deadly, school bus crashes can happen.

(01:51):
In n h T s A administrator Mark rose Kind
publicly reversed the organization's long standing position and began advocating
for three point seat belts on every school bus, and
after one tragic crash in in Morris County, New Jersey,
involving two deaths and forty three injuries, the National Transportation
Safety Board opened a full investigation into school bus safety.

(02:14):
The board's report concluded that quote to provide the best
protection for all occupants of large school buses. The remaining
step is for each state to require the installation of
lap shoulder belts in all new large school buses. Today,
seat belts are only federally mandated on small school buses
or those weighing ten thousand pounds or about kilos or less.

(02:38):
States are allowed to decide whether to mandate them on
the rest of their school buses, and currently only eight
states Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York,
and Texas have laws requiring seat belts on large school buses,
though many others are considering similar legislation. Opponents obviously want
to keep kids safe, but point to the cost not

(03:00):
just of buying and installing the belts, but of those
belts reducing buses passenger capacity, which would mean school districts
would need more buses in their fleets. And since most
school buses are on the road for at least ten
and often up to twenty years, it's unlikely that tightly
budgeted school districts would choose to retrofit older buses due
to those costs, which means it would potentially take decades

(03:22):
for new legislation requiring seatbelts to take effect across a
fleet as new buses slowly replace older ones. For now,
it's unclear weather federal standards will change, but states are
still free to set tougher restrictions as they see fit.
Parents may take some comfort in knowing that school buses
are the most regulated vehicles on the road, and as
a result, students riding them to school are statistically about

(03:45):
seventy times safer than they would be traveling to school
by car. Today's episode was written by Series three Wit
and produced by Tyler clang A brain Stuff is a
production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more
in this amounts of other topics, visit our home planet
how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(04:08):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.