So: confirmation bias, what gets reported, etc, aside . . .
To me, it does seem that church buses/vans are involved in crashes in unusually high numbers. If we are to roll with my outlook, why might this be so? My tentative ideas are:
-Church bus drivers may be inexperienced/non-licensed. Some of these accidents seem to be related to “Hey! Brother Smith used to drive a forklift at a warehouse, let’s rent that 15-passenger van and have him drive us to Bible camp!”
-Transportation might not be kept in optimal mechanical shape (lack of money, borrowed vehicles, simply falls through the cracks).
You’re definitely on to something. Pretty much every news story I hear about multiple death car accidents are church vans. Packed full of Asian people.
Too much faith in Jesus, and not enough skill in motor vehicle operation.
I’ll go with confirmation bias/reporting bias. Hundreds of other types of vehicles crash every day, but don’t get national coverage because of low occupancy.
Most mass transportation is undertaken by people with CDL’s and equipment that is maintained and inspected by the govt. Crashes and incidents can happen in that situation, but there have been steps taken to reduce it to as much as is practical. More steps could be taken, but I am not sure that there is a good cost benefit ratio there.
Church busses, not so much. I do not think you need anything more than a regular DL ni order to have a dozen or more lives in your hands, in a vehicle that has never received any inspection.
I have a friend who drives a church van. Her church doesn’t have its own parking lot, but there’s a parking deck down the street that the parishioners use. She volunteers to drive the church van to transport the elderly to and from the church so they don’t have to walk so far.
This is a woman who hates driving and freaks out every time she has to get on the expressway. But she volunteers out of guilt and a desire to be a good Christian.
I imagine a lot of those unfortunate church van operators you hear about have similar motivations.
I think a big part of the problem is those 15-passenger vans.
A 15-passenger van is not a bus, it’s a regular van with a tacked-on rear end. They’re overloaded, top-heavy and rear-heavy. They’re barely able to handle a shuttle trip between a hotel and the airport.
Load one of those things to capacity, put an inexperienced driver behind the wheel, go faster than 20 mph, maybe swerve to avoid something - it’s wonder they don’t ALL crash.
Is it confirmation bias to giggle at the irony of these people wasting their lives in a vain attempt to not burn for eternity only to burn to death in a bus crash?
Not true in my state, at least. My church used to have problems not having anyone who was certified who could drive the actual buses. They would have to have multiple people take the vans with 7 or fewer other occupants. Also, you have to be 25 or older.
Granted, I’m not sure if that’s just an insurance thing or a full out law. But I know it’s more than just church policy.
We should distinguish between the frequency of crashes and the frequency of injuries/fatalities. It’s quite possible that there is a somewhat disproportionate number of crashes because difficult-to-handle vehicles are driven by amateurs and a significantly disproportionate number of injuries/fatalities because of the number of people in the vehicle, the lack of easy exit for people in the rear in a 15 passenger van, the age of the occupants (presumably they skew older if they’re going to church) and perhaps a lower chance of using seatbelts.
I know that in at least one Canadian province, transporting students in a 15 passenger van is prohibited for safety reasons.
I’ve been in the market for first, a 15 passenger van, and then a shuttle bus. From what I’ve read, it seems that at least some churches and church organizations are aware that the vans are unstable in accidents when fully loaded. The push has been to get something with a wider duallie rear end (ie, a shuttle bus) for taking large groups on long trips.
Well, that presupposes that the OP was asking about church bus crashes as a subset of [ALL vehicle crashes] as opposed to church bus crashes as a subset of [crashes involving high-occupancy vehicles]. Once we get that established, THEN we can examine for confirmation bias (which might be there in either case).
If there is an actual statistical anomaly here, one factor could be the relative frequency of church-related travel. Outside of schools, who else is transporting groups of people around by buses? If fifty percent of rented bus accidents involve church groups, it may just reflect the fact that fifty percent of rented bus trips involve church groups.
There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of church bus trips everyday that don’t end in a crash. I believe the OP’s perspective is confirmation bias, combined with the common reporting of such crashes because when they do occur there are multiple injuries due to the nature of multiple passengers.
