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Councilor: Students should be belted in and supervised on school buses
By adamg on Wed, 01/14/2015 - 8:24am
City Councilor Charles Yancey (Dorchester) today will propose ordinances to require all BPS school buses that can carry 35 or more students to be equipped with passenger seat belts and to carry a monitor to keep them from getting out of line.
The council will take up the proposals at its regular meeting, which starts at noon in its fifth-floor chambers in City Hall.
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Comments
Hasn't study after study
Hasn't study after study shown that children are safer in buses with no seatbelt? The seats themselves are designed to protect children in an accident. Any seatbelts will quickly become damaged and useless anyway and probably lead to more injury than prevent.
Bad kids will use them as
Bad kids will use them as weapons to whip other kids.
The elevated design of the buses themselves and the tight quarters of the seats are supposed to eliminate the need for seatbelts in the first place.
Yes, yes, and Yes!
Everything you have said is the gospel truth. Totally hit the nail on the head. Please attend the hearing on this!
yeah, because who needs experts
Let's get random Joes who know nothing about transportation safety, but read Something Online.
Is that True?
I actually don't know. I keep hearing this, but I've never seen a study about it.
I will say that I just returned from a trip to Europe, and the one time I took a tourist bus for a tour, we were told to buckle up.
And regarding monitors: seems like a thankless job, but I know that we had them on our school buses when I was a little kid.
According to the NHTSA
NHTSA says:
Science is the answer
Why must we waste everyone's time talking about seat belts when scientists have already studied it and determined that they are not needed? Thanks for the informative post!
Not cost effective
Given the accident infrequency and safety of school buses, few if any lives would be saved by retrofitting 60 or so seat belts to each of the many thousands of school buses on the road. More lives may be lost with children using them to choke or whip each other vs. saved in crashes.
This is much like adding stop signs or traffic lights to intersections. Both these devices cause rear-end collisions because without them, people wouldn't be stopping to get rear-ended. Additional accidents occur from people spacing out and running them, colliding with other drivers who stop looking for other vehicles crossing because they have the green light. Those negatives have to be weighed against the positives from adding the traffic signal. The positives win with higher traffic volumes.
There is no pure win in many situations. Positives have to outweigh negatives.
Because he had nothing better to do?
I'm not sure I'm seeing the public need here. Have we had lots of childhood fatalities from unbelted kids in buses? Any increase in bus accidents even? Any buses even get up above 30 mph on our streets?
This seems like a waste of attention.
We're talking about Chuck
We're talking about Chuck Yancey here - the king of low expectations.
BU Finally Showed Up
Now that they've solved the problem with diversity and local employment by getting BU's president to testify in front of the council they can work on less pressing matters.
How about
Dealing with the problem of the MBTA becoming unusable for non-students ( in some neighborhoods moreso than others) especially when the kids get out if school? This lasts for hours, basically 12 noon onwards up til 4PM, on school days. Forest Hills and other stations become a nightmare.
Yawn...
I have no children so therefore have no opinion/idea on what is required to raise a child properly but I think on-line activity is more of a danger to your little one than a seat belt when riding in a iron lunch box. Or their language, view of the world, elders, work ethic etc.
Even if buses were equipped
Even if buses were equipped with seat belts, how would you enforce their use?
Bus attendants, of course
Sounds like a make-work proposal. As if busing for the Boston school district isn't expensive enough.
Is this the same proposal shot down in Marshfield?
The Patriot Ledger
By Jessica Trufant
http://www.patriotledger.com/article/20150114/NEWS/150118497
Dorchester needs bulletproofing more
Seems like most of the fatalities in motor vehicles there is from occupants getting shot from the outside!
Behavior control, belted
Behavior control, belted down kids are less likely to fight and throw stuff. As a middle school teacher, I like the idea.
So I take it then that
you and all your fellow teachers would be willing to take a pay cut to implement this plan.
If the city decides to do
If the city decides to do they'll take it out of all of our paychecks as taxpayers, that's just how it works. In any case, it's not the worst idea - just ask any teacher, student or parent about the sort of dangerous crap that happens on buses. I often hear about serious bullying incidents on buses, but it's very hard to deal with these issues because the driver has to drive and it's not a controlled space in same way that the school itself is. There are many kids who stop coming to school simply to avoid the bullying on the buses. Yancy is on the right track with this, the district and city need to provide students with safe transportation, and I'm not just talking about car crashes.
Good point, anon.
One doesn't have to be a school teacher (and I'm not.), to think that having seat-belts installed on school buses is an excellent idea whose time is long overdue. Not only would it reduce the likelihood of kids fighting, bullying other kids and/or throwing stuff, but it would reduce the chance(s) of another accident like the one where the bus carrying some kids who were part of a Newton school music band that was on its way home from a tour in Canada flipped over and killed two or three of the kids, if one gets the drift.
Big difference
There are big differences between an interstate motor coach (many of which do have seatbelts) and a school bus that rarely gets up much speed above 35mph.
Tying them down sounds good in theory, but what about on a third different type of bus that many Boston middle schoolers ride all the time: the MBTA bus?
School buses don't have seatbelts?
The ones I rode growing up in the mid-90s always had seatbelts, though no one forced students to wear them past elementary school.
You can't honestly tell me the school buses are still being manufactured without seat belts...though of course, it's up to each school system to decide if and how to ensure children comply with buckling up.
For what it's worth, in high school I bruised my throat when my school bus hit a garbage can that had blown out in the street on a windy day and the bus stopped short, throwing me into the back of the seat in front of me.
Yes, we can honestly tell you that
School buses are being made without seat belts. Maybe not all of them, but most. The ones you rode on seem to have been an anomaly.