And to be PC....
BS!!!!!!!
heavy belt buckles as weapons, injuring other riders..
1) If we can make cars out of high stress plastic / polymers, there is probably a seat belt out there already.
2) My boy is 13, rides a school bus every day. Three times this year the driver has come to a complete stop, in a 4 lane (4 lane southbound) road, "If you don't sit down and be quiet, YOU...and YOU...and YOU...are getting OFF...THIS bus RIGHT NOW!
The boy says this driver is, "A great big black guy.."
As opposed to other drivers he has had, "Hispanic woman - we can't understand a word she says and she has no idea what we are saying..and all hell breaks loose when she is driving......"
It is next to impossible to make sure that all students keep their belts properly fastened, so that they are not injured by the belts in an accident.
A BOLD face lie.
I own a 2005 Chevy Tahoe. Within 6 seconds of putting the vehicle in F, it lets me know who does not have the seat belt on, a door that did not close all the way.....
What, BlueBird never heard of this technolgy?
If a bus has to be evacuated in an emergency, such as a fire, panicked or disoriented students might be trapped by their belts.
1) The bus gets hit by another vehicle.....the bus hits another vehicle....bodies are going flying....yes?
2) If a bus has to be evacuated in an emergency...
And it seems like the emergency is usually the result of an impact...not a driver going full throttle into a fire storm, not a driver seeing the Horryweird crap of a bridge disappearing, during a Magnitude 95 earthquake........
The absolute dumbest argument of this is....
When drivers balance these concerns against the many safety features already built into the design of school buses, they conclude that given the way buses are presently operated, they are safer without seat belts.
Right! Like these Union Hacks are even qualified to talk about this...........they conclude........
I conclude that for the most part, we hire idiots to drive our children around....
The number of times I call the district about a "hot rod" driver in a "skool bus" is ever increasing.......
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The powers that be ask **drivers** about the safety design of school buses?
Bus drivers in my county are simple people: housewives, some retired folks, high school drop outs, etc. I would think that true engineers with many degrees behind their names should be the people we should be asking about roll-over, center of gravity, impact velocity, metal fatigue, etc. We should also be asking the doctors who treat the 17,000 emergency room admissions due to bus accidents what they think. I’m willing to bet the split lips, fractured teeth, black eyes, broken bones, contusions, concussions, etc. would be greatly reduced if seat belts were required.
By the way, your point about car electronic systems notifying the driver of a seat belt not being fastened is a good one.
Last year, after two deaths involving a dragging and crushing by school buses, I checked the National Safety Center regarding bus safety. They claim that riding a bus is safer than taking a car,,but,,,last time I looked they compared buses driven during transport hours to injuries of all children in cars during that time. They did **not** factor out the teens, babysitters, and non-relatives who were driving to and from school with other teens, or children who were not their own, in the car. They did not even separate out the task of driving a child to school from all the other reasons a child might be in a car.
To really know if buses are safer than mom or dad driving a child, they would need to look specifically at injuries occurring to a child in a car with mom and dad taking them directly to or from school, and the seat belt fastened during school transport times. I am willing to bet they aren’t about to do that comparison because school bus injuries would come out on the losing end.
My advice to parents: Keep your child off the bus. If you must institutionalize your child, take them to school yourself, with the seat belt fastened! Do this and they will not be bullied, sexually harassed, raped, and their chances of winding up in the emergency room for injuries of all sorts will be a lot less. And,,,finally, if you take them to school they are not going to be dragged or crushed to death by their school bus.