Why school buses don't have seat belts?

Question

Its probably not a really great question but, Why is it that police strongly forces on buckling up our seat belts, when i have noticed , even when i was little.

why school buses dont have seat belts?

last night i was watching the news and there was a school bus that had fliped over and lots of children were injured , wouldnt it be safer for the school buses have seat belts ?or do they just presume that nothing is going to happen to them ?

Answer 1

its a stupid law that the insurance companies created and strongly lobbied for. i dont think the law extends to buses

Answer 2

too costly

Answer 3

Because the impact is not as strong for a bus in case it gets in an accident.  Cuz the bus is big

Answer 4

Many of the newer buses in my area do.  They are gradually being phased in and eventually all of them will have seat belts.

Answer 5

All school buses are required to have all saftey equiptment like that red stopsign on the side of the bus that flashes including seatbelts.  They are most likely tucked under the cushion hanging out behind the seat.  ITs because no one wears them and there is absolutely no way to enforce 30 screaming kids twice everyday to wear their seat belts.  Its gonna have to take a big mishap may headlines "Bus Rams a elephant" to get people aware that seatbelts save lives.  Expecially on a bus

Answer 6

Children are not likely to fly out the front window on a school bus.  Most buses do not travel at the same velocities achieved by smaller vehicles.  There is a longer way to drop were the bus to flip and the child left hanging decides to unbuckle.

Answer 7

since when you see buses having seat belts?

public buses dont even own seat belts!

it's just like that.

Answer 8

i dont know

Answer 9

Because they want kids to die to weed out the population!!

Answer 10

Money is usually the reason why we don't do the things we know we should. Everyone knew the levees in New Orleans were subpar and wouldn't hold up to a hurricane, but no one was willing to spend the necessary dollars to fix them. We all know how that turned out. Retrofitting the existing bus fleet with seat belts is expensive. Folks don't want to spend the money. I suppose we'll have to wait for a hideous bus accident with scads of gruesome fatalities before anything is done.

Answer 11

That's such a clever question. In the UK any coach kids go on tend to have seatbelts.

Answer 12

No one thought of it.

Answer 13

its a question of priorities, the misuse of public funds

Answer 14

cuz is a bus not a car so it wont have seat belt for ya . and also you know how many seat belt do we need to put on all the skew bus it like alot if every bus have it that be super cool but it also cost alot for goverment . haha the goverment doesnt care about us so they just dotn want to let u have seat belt on the bus that all i mean school bus lol

Answer 15

More money for the teachers? Teachers are paid very little for what they do. The reason school buses don't have safety belts is due to immaturity. How many kids do you know that wear seatbelts because they should, without being told? They had them on the bus when I was a kid and they were used as toys and in some cases, as weapons. You'd be prone to many more accidents from this type of behavior than the number of kids injured yearly in school bus accidents.

Answer 16

http://www.safety-council.org/info/traff...

http://www.ask.com/web?qsrc=167&o=0&l=di...

Answer 17

Bus manufacturers don't want to spend the money, but lobbyists are fighting to get that changed. It won't be long before buses are required to have seat belts too.

Answer 18

i agree with you completely.  If Children NEVER use them in their everyday life as a passenger on a school bus, whats going to make them all of a sudden use them when they have a car of their own?  

That is a horrible example that is being set by the people in authority

Answer 19

I was a school bus driver for 17 years and the story they tried to tell us was that the seats were designed so that in an accident the seat in front would cushion the child on impact  and they would slip between the seats.???  I don't know if that is a true story but I think it would have been very hard for the drivers to get all the 66/72 students to buckle up, when I was a driver, 10 years ago.  today they are so accustomed to it that it might not be so hard.  There are alot of sweet little beings out there that REALLY like to push the rules.

Answer 20

That's actually one of the better questions I've seen here.

You know it's a good question when no one can answer it.

Answer 21

it would be safe to have seat belts.  but what if there was a problem and kids needed out of the bus quickly and they were small children that couldn't undo seat belts.... that could be equally as disastrous.

Answer 22

our school doesnt

Answer 23

its accyually safer

Answer 24

very good question. doesnt make any sense at all to me. only thing i could come up with is maybe bcuz they know that 1 bus driver couldn't force all the kids on the bus listen to them

Answer 25

buses are rather large with specially trained drivers and lots of flashing lights and laws to protect them. The one you talk about was caused by  driver negligance. How do you enforce a 50 person seat belt use, do we need to hire seat belt cops for every bus. are you willing to pay extra for all this. how many buses have you ever seen in an accident. do children get hurt at times sure and that is sad but you can't protect against every possible thing that can or could happen. we have many  things that happen thousands of times a day lets devote energy to them rather than something that happens a couple times a year

Answer 26

they should have belts

good point

elz thats not true

Answer 27

This question has been brought up many times on Y!A, do a search to see some of the previous iterations.

The answer is twofold. First, the mass and height of the bus provides a very high level of protection for the occupants inside in the event of a collision. Since 1990, only nine percent of people killed in accidents involving school buses were occupants of the bus. The others were either pedestrians or occupants of other vehicles. The high seatbacks on buses also provide a level of restraint. Second, a more frequent problem on buses is an event which requires rapid evacuation of the bus (such as a fire). In this instance, the first order of business is to get the kids off of the bus as quickly as possible. This is why bus evac drills are done fairly frequently, and is also why buses for public transportation have breakaway windows and roof-mounted escape hatches. A quick evacuation would be greatly hampered by having the kids belted in, as young children would be likely to panic and require help from the driver to be unbelted. Having to unbelt even a few children on the bus would take valuable time which could not be spared if there were a fire on the bus.

So, to summarize, it is likely more kids would be injured or killed if they were required to wear seatbelts than not.

Answer 28

I agree, but I notice the higher the IQ of  the educational school facility, the less common sense they exercise with the safety of other peoples children.  Their excuse is always "lack of funds".

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Answer 29

How would the school bus driver regulate all those children?  It should be mandatory, but ...

Answer 30

This has come up a few times, and there are a few reasons why they don't.

Bus seats are padded, set close together and have high backs. This is so if the bus is hit from the front or the back, the rider will hit the seat without travelling far and without putting their body in a potentially dangerous situation.

If there is an emergency where the students have to leave the bus quickly, the seatbelt is a short delay. But the hazard comes to the responsibility of the bus driver to make sure that all of the students are unbuckled and out. There is also the problem of jammed buckles in this situation.

Cost has a small addition. Not only for the seatbelts, but also for inspecting the belt material every year.

Seat belts can also be used as weapons by swinging the buckle at another rider. They can also be used to break the glass of the window next to the seat.

As for the news report, it is actually very uncommon for busses to flip over. But again, in that case, the students would be stuck upside down in their seats, and the bus driver again, would still have to ensure their safety.

Answer 31

i noticed the newer ones now do, but you are right. i really dont know, maybe because you dont know how many people are going to be sitting in one seat (ie: sometimes there are like 3-4 kids on one seat, which isnt safe anyway)

they should definitely do something about it. pretty stupid if you ask me