Reply to Would a bus without seatbelts keep you from a summer camp?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]11:21, where do you fall in the seat belt issue? Do you think kids would be safer with them on a bus/highway in the event of an accident? [/quote]

I have kids now who ride the school bus, albeit on local roads and not highways unless they're on a field trip heading downtown. Putting on my parent hat (my bus driver hat was many years ago), it's my understanding that school buses are designed to "compartmentalize" kids in an accident -- the high backs and narrow distances between seats (of regular and short buses) are supposedly effective at limiting/absorbing the crash forces. It's not the same as riding unbuckled in a car, which is a no-go. It's also not the same as those 15-passenger vans, which give me the heebie-jeebies.

Add seat belts on buses and the unused, unbuckled belts become projectiles within those formerly safe compartments. And heaven forbid a buckle gets jammed, or a kid buckles wrong, or two BFFs buckle themselves together, or the existing bus safety features get pared down based on the assumption of 100% correct, reliable, unsupervised usage by six-year-olds. Because you just can't ask the driver to keep getting up and checking everyone. I pulled my camp bus over on the side of some winding Potomac roads a couple times to help campers settle down (the old "Don't make me stop this bus" bit), but it's not feasible to expect a driver to stop immediately every time someone pipes up from the last row "Johnny's unbuckled again!" Because you would have to, or a parent would be sure to call complaining about how "the driver kept going even though Johnny came unbuckled."[/quote]

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