This is as silly as all the “I’m against the death penalty, but this guy actually deserves it!” posts. If you see a problem with local traffic laws, take it up with your city, county, and state governments. Begging the federal government to step in and usurp even greater authority from the states is not a solution to anything, least of all your pet peeve of the week. Yes, kids have been killed (THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!) by bus stop runners. That’s all the more reason to get your state government to do something. Get your city to pass an ordnance. So many more kids have been killed by other things. Should the federal government pass a law every time a child gets hurt? The Federal Government can barely handle their current responsibilities. Now you want to ask them to do the job of your state’s government as well?
By “where,” I meant do you focus on school bus loading/unloading accidents, or do you focus on traffic light violators. The scale of the school bus loading/unloading problem is such that no matter what resources you throw at the existing problem, the most lives you could possibly save per year is about six, whereas working harder to reduce the incidence of people running red traffic lights could save as many as 800 lives per year.
I don’t think it’s worth wrecking hundreds* (thousands?)* of people’s lives by taking their rent money through exhorbitant fines, or making them lose their jobs with a month or two in jail, in pursuit of saving just six lives per year. Instead, get serious about red-light runners. Penalties don’t need to be very large, but put red-light cameras on as many intersections as possible, so that penalties become very reliable. Along the way, increase penalties for rear-ending someone who is stopping for a red light, so that people will be even less motivated to violate a red light.
The OP offers this:
Not intending to minimize those bus-related tragedies, but in the same time frame, we’ve had dozens of tragedies because some a-hole in a hurry drove through a red light. The difference is that red-light runner deaths don’t make national news because there’s too many of them.
*SWAGging at the # of school bus stop violators per year.
Based upon this argument of speedy enactment of legislation, we should just do away with all state criminal codes and enact one single federal criminal code.
Oh, wait a minute, that’s not the purpose of the federal government…never mind.
Numerically, how do deaths from being run over by someone passing the bus illegally compare to deaths from school bus accidents attributable to school buses not having seat belts? Should we mandate belts on buses before penalizing passers?
The addition of seat belts on school buses costs money.
According to this PDF, there were about 12 fatalities per year from 2007-2016 on school buses due to crashes. Full-sized school buses are heavy, generally around 25,000 pounds (not including the meaty occupants), and occupants are positioned high above the roadway, generally well above the impact zone. In a collision with a 4000-pound sedan, the bus always wins. To really have a chance at injuring bus occupants, you need to hit it with a semi or a train, or have it tip over, but those types of bus crashes are relatively rare.
To decide whether seat belts are worth the expense, we need to assign a value to what we’re trying to achieve, i.e. saving 12 lives per year. According to this PDF, the DOT values a statistical human life at $9.6M. So our school bus seat belt program would need to cost less than $115.2M per year.
What is the annualized cost for installing, inspecting, maintaining, and rigorously enforcing the use of 72 seat belts each on 480,000 buses? Based on the above, it would need to be less than $240 per seat belt in order to be justified on the basis of lives saved. That assumes school bus seat belts prevent every single one of those 12 deaths, every year; to the extent that they come up short, the cost of a seat belt program would need to be even lower to be justifiable.
I’m betting that seat belts on school buses aren’t a justifiable expense.
OTOH…
Rigorous enforcement of laws against illegal school bus passes could be done with a couple of dash cams on each bus (facing forward and backward) that catch license plates of offenders. Most days, nothing happens, and the cameras just loop-record, erasing old footage as new footage is recorded. When an incident happens, the driver makes a note of the time. After the shift, if there was an incident, the video from the corresponding time period gets downloaded/reviewed and a citation gets mailed to the vehicle owner. Thinking back to when I rode the bus in high school, ISTR an illegal pass happening maybe once every couple of weeks. With reliable enforcement, the fines (at, say $250 a pop) could easy cover the cost of the equipment, and then some.
Don’t need destructive penalties, just reliable penalties. Dash cams can facilitate this, while probably covering the cost of the enforcement program.
Returning to fix a glaring math error: $115M divided by 480,000 buses is $240 per bus per year. The cost of equipping buses with seatbelts would surely be greater than this, and therefore definitely not justifiable.
We just had a video on our local TV station showing a driver going past a stopped bus.
While we all agree with the op it would be great if that person got a ticket I think it’s relevant to point out no kids were in danger because they were all on the right side of the bus.
Go after the errant drivers and use the ticket money to fund better bus routes that eliminate children crossing high speed roadways.
Due to a number of horrendous accidents here involving school buses, the Chinese government mandated much safer vehicles a few years ago. The things look like spanking brand new yellow buses of my youth; however, they are super safe. The problem here now isn’t the buses; it’s the other idiots driving around like the laws of physics are mere suggestions.
Now that I got that out of the way, the US federal government really should look into getting the new school buses from China.
But I am always told that children are specially valuable beyond price, and no expense should be spared. At least that’s what people tell me when they want to dismiss other kinds of activism.