Please note, as I offered before (#14) that there are significant design and construction differences between coach-type vehicles and school buses.
It appears that, absent the specific protections provided by design and construction on school buses, coach-type buses would indeed see a positive effect if seat belts were properly retro-fitted or (better) included as original design.
The driver’s seat on both types, BTW, is designed to include seat belt anchors.
I don’t want this to sound snarky, but the reason some of us aren’t talking about school buses as a distinct species is because for some of us, no such species exists. School bus services are provided using regular private-hire coaches or public buses on private contracts. If they’re good enough for the public (including children) to use at any other time, what’s the problem?
Sure is, since 18th Sept last year. The snappily titled: The Motor Vehicles (Wearing of Seat Belts) (Amendment) Regulations 2006.
(I too suffer from 29" legs. Which is nice for coaches and planes. It’s the only time I get to laugh at my 35"-legged wife.)
That is true. I’ve seen people complain about the bulky door emergency-chute things (after they’ve worked hard to blag an emergency exit seat), while thinking ‘but that thing is a million miles from the seat, what are you, a giraffe?’
You said this in at least one other thread as wall and I don’t think you get it. U.S. school buses follow a classic design that is over 60 years old and hasn’t changed that much over time. They are relatively cheap, easy to maintain, strong, dependable, safe, and the general public know exactly what they are no matter where you go. They don’t operate like other buses either. Each is dedicated to one route and picks kids up right at their home or very close to it. They have special laws as well with safety in mind. They have stop signs that come out at every stop and traffic in both directions has to stop until the kid(s) is on board and the driver retracts the signs. The driver also has to stop before each railway crossing, open the door, and actively check for trains before proceeding. Big yellow school buses also have standard evacuation procedures that kids across the land follow. These measures make them very safe and standardized.
In a previous thread, I remember you questioning why school districts would spend money on dedicated buses. The most relevant answer is that we don’t have other bus fleets across most of the country. The yellow school bus fleet is all there is at least for that type of purpose. In some places, school buses can be rented by outside parties so they can serve other purposes when buses are needed for group travel like to a sporting event.
I don’t think you grasp how few of us in the U.S. have useful access to any public transportation at all, let alone shining fleets of buses. It exists in a few places but if you start coloring in the U.S. by land area, 99% of it won’t have public transportation suited for daily use. If you look at the U.S. as a whole, we use cars, planes, and big yellow school buses. Anything else is strictly location dependent and only serves a small percentage of the population.
In either type of bus, the driver doesn’t have a padded seat back in front of him to bounce off of in case there’s a crash. All but the front row of bus seats do.
No, I do get it, which is why I thought it was important to bring up in this thread. Design the safest school bus physically possible, and it’ll still not be in use outside of North America (I’m guessing Canada follows your lead 
) I’m coming from the other angle - if a private-hire coach is OK for us to take kids to Poland in, surely it’s OK for the trip to school?
Fine, if you’re in a situation where there’s no option available to hire in vehicles (btw, ‘public transport’ != ‘private hire coaches’), you set up your own system, which from what I can see is what’s happened for suburban America. In these situations, where the only people using the buses are kids and they’re going to be on low-speed roads, then seat belts are unlikely to be of use (as on urban buses). But I can’t see how these are anything other than just filling a particular gap.
The point of this ramble: interpreting “why don’t buses have seat belts” as “why don’t school buses have seat belts” turns it not only into a more specific question, but also into a specific geographic niche.
I think we are getting closer to a consensus but not quite. Big yellow school buses are used here because they are cheap and get the job done. Your alternative seems to suggest that we should have people buy much fancier and more expensive buses and then pay them to drive kids to school. I am not sure I follow that. Most places don’t need private hire buses because there is no real use for them especially if they would be commandeered by school kids during the peak morning and afternoon travel periods. They would just be a different form of school bus themselves with just a different style. However, where I am from, the big yellow buses are owner and maintained by the driver so I guess we have some form of that. The driver’s sometimes do charter trips to make extra money but there aren’t a huge number of them around.
Yep, that’s the difference - with what we use, the school contracts are one small part of their business. So they’re regular buses and coaches.
Onto hijack territory - how does having a bus designed for child safety (this whole padded-seat thing etc.) affect the safety of adults in those seats?
Another thing about the big yellow busses is that they are as uncomfortable as hell. You wouldn’t want to go to Poland in them. The insides are about as stripped down as can be and they smell very funny. They are unairconditioned (a bigger discomfort in a land where it’s usually above 90 from mid-May to mid-September, and I think, unheated. They do one thing–take kids to school. Everything is designed for safety, low cost, and ease of maintenance. So yeah, they are a completely different animal than even city busses.
It’s something of an America rite of passage to be coming home from some sort of early summer field trip, sunburned as hell, sweating like a pig in one of these ovens, only to more or less fuse to the vinyl seat. Getting up quickly at the other end, you leave most of your skin behind.
The OP made it clear that the question was generic. And in my posts I’ve discussed both types of buses separately.
In this case, yes, the specific geographic niche is the US and Canada.
Since the US had made a specific commitment to universal public school, this required some kind of universally available transportation. But universally available transportation simply does not exist in the US for the general population. So school buses were created to serve the need.
Due to the government control of public schools (through local school districts), government (the local school districts) was the obvious customer for buses. Governments (ours at least) don’t usually buy things ‘off the shelf’, but commonly create their own specifications for the purchased goods. Thus school buses were “spec’ed”. And, yes, “cheap” was often one of the criteria. So school buses are rather spartan.
But having now entrusted the safety of our kids to these buses during their transportation, those “specs” came to have a safety element. Larger school districts with more money could do their own evaluations and spec their own buses, while poorer districts had to copy somebody else’s specs. Eventually the Federal government became the final authority for school bus specifications, partly justified by the Federal roadway system. Now everybody must use the national standards for school bus construction. Viola! The 48 foot yellow and black.
Transit coaches had their own separate evolution. Since they (originally) could be anything and still offer themselves for hire, rather different market forces were involved in their design. Economies of scale in manufacturers eventually led to something like standardization, but it was and is more like convergent evolution. Coach manufacturers can still produce almost anything they want and call it a bus. The only limitations are the Federal government imposed general safety standards for all highway vehicles.
nitpick- many regular school bus routes include highways- not just low speed roads. In addition, school buses are routinely used for field trips and sporting events when highway use occurs.
School bus costs represent the single largest line item in our school budget after teacher salaries. School buses as they are designed in the US are cheap and safe. Using coach type buses, while they would be safe, would be prohibitively expensive. They are used for longer field trips and cost much more than a regular yellow school bus when they are used.
That pretty much explained what had been puzzling me both here and elsewhere, as to why America ended up with such a specialised vehicle for a use not very dissimilar to uses of buses elsewhere.
That also confirms something I suspected, that there are indeed alternatives, albeit with a different cost (which is probably also affected by having less availabilty/competition in some parts of America, for geographic reasons)
That would be Micky “Rat” Bruce in grade seven. He commandeered an intercity motor coach and drove it through downtown Oakville.
We were day boys at a private school. We day boys commuted via the regular intercity coach, rather than by a school bus or a chartered coach. The driver would always stop at a variety store at the west end of Oakville’s downtown core to go inside and pick up parcels. One day Micky Rat took the opportunity to hop into the driver’s seat, put the bus in gear, and drive to the other end of the downtown core, with the rest of us cheering wildly.
There is plenty of competition among coach bus lines, at least in our small state, so a lack of competition has not been our experience. When we choose a coach bus line, it is often run by the same manager that provides the school buses (disctricts don’t own school the buses, but contract out) although we can choose among many contractors and fleets of buses. These are only used 1-2X a year, though. Long distance field trips require a bathroom on board.
Coach buses are more expensive because they are luxurious- have bathrooms, DVD screens, captains type chairs, upolstery etc. Yellow school buses are safe and cheap (and easy to clean!)- no district could afford to use coach buses for every day routes.
It would be like taking a limo to work everyday. Sure you could, it is an option- but for most of us, who could afford it!
You can purchase half a dozen or more new school busses for the price of one new intercity motor coach.
I rode on plenty of school buses growing up in which the seat in front of me was either thinly padded or not padded at all.
A few years ago I made submissions to a coroner’s inquest into an intercity motor coach roll over, making about a dozen recommendations.
The lawyer for the bus company recommended that there be no changes to equipment or procedures.
I concluded that it really all just comes down to money. Intercity motor coaches have an excellent safety record, but not a perfect record. Improvements such as seat belts that would reduce serious injuries and deaths could be made, but the manufacturers and operators do not want to pay the price. They would rather have the occasional passenger pay the price.
The jury accepted most of my recommendations, including that seat belts be mandated.
This is just another data point, but it will be picked up in future inquests and lawsuits concerning rollovers. As it becomes easier and easier to find liability due to such precedents, the operators will have a monetary incentive to purchase busses with seat belts, and seat belt lobbyists will have more ammunition when trying to persuade politicians to mandate seat belts. As with seat belts for cars, it will take a long time, but I am confident that eventually seat belts will find their way into North American intercity motor coaches.
You must be in the North. Oh, duh! Just saw Nutmeg. Sorry.
Yep, the owned versus contracted shows a holdover from the historic industrialized versus agrarian division between the north and the south. In general terms, states “up north” had private companies with sufficient capitalization and the necessary technical expertise to purchase school buses by the fleet-load, then hire them out to school districts.
Down here in the southland, only governments had that kind of money. Agricultural economies may be land rich, but they are typically cash poor. So here the school districts themselves typically own their own fleets.
Recently a growing number of southern districts have contracted for services, but I believe the majority still own and operate their own school bus fleets.
BrightNShiny says
Well, you must be old(er) or your local fleet was aged itself. The seat distances, high backs, and padding were mandated for buses manufactured in or after 1977.
Just a quick plug for the Greyhound Bus Museum in Hibbing, Minnesota.
Tour the Greyhound Bus Museum, have a look at the giant open pit Hull Rust Mahoning iron mine, also in Hibbing, Minnesota, then drop down to Duluth to visit the Lake Superior Railroad Museum and the William A. Irvin lake freighter.
It will give you a sense of the massive resources of the USA and the vibrancy of her people who turned the nation into a world power. Collectively, it is awe inspiring.