Personal Injury Blog

NHTSA Rejects School Bus Seatbelt Petition

August 27th, 2011
School Bus safety

The petition asks for seatbelts in all school buses.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has rejected a petition filed by consumer safety groups, calling for a mandatory School Bus Seatbelt requirement.  According to the agency, there’s no evidence that mandating seatbelts justifies the expenses involved.

The petition had been filed by consumers groups, safety advocates as well as doctors.  At least twenty-one consumer safety groups, including the Center for Auto Safety signed the petition.  According to the petition, seatbelts are necessary to ensure the safety of children in an accident.  The School Bus Seatbelt petition asked that seat belts be made mandatory on all school buses.

Additionally, the petition compared the injury rates in two separate accidents, one involving a bus equipped with seatbelts, and the other involving a bus with no seatbelts.  In a Florida accident in 2008, in which the bus did come with seatbelts, only one child was seriously injured.  However, in the other accident that occurred in Arizona in 1996, the bus involved did not have seatbelts, and there were several ejections from the bus during the rollover.  At least one child was left permanently disabled.

However, in a decision that is expected to be soon published in the Federal Register, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has decided that the benefits of mandating seatbelt law school buses would not outweigh the expenses involved.  The federal agency estimates that the cost of adding seatbelts would be $5,485-$7,346 per bus.  The agency doesn’t expect that any safety benefits from mandating seatbelts would justify these costs.

The agency further says that mandating seatbelts on all school buses may force already strained school districts to reduce bus services.  This could actually lead to more numbers of accidents, because school students would then be reduced to walking to school or riding in cars, both of which are more dangerous than riding a school bus.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that school buses are some of the safest modes of transportation in the country.  The overall fatality rate for school buses is approximately 6 times lower than for passenger cars.  According to agency estimates, less than 1% of school transportation-relating deaths occur in school buses.  In comparison, pedestrian children walking to school account for 12% of all school transportation-related deaths, and children riding to school in automobiles account for 79% of deaths.

In the petition, the consumer safety group cited recommendations made by the National Transportation Safety Board decades ago.  Years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended that all buses including school buses come with seatbelts to reduce the risk of serious injury or fatality to passengers in the event of an accident.  However, Los Angeles bus accident lawyers have been disappointed to note that neither the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration nor the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have taken these recommendations very seriously.

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